Bitcoin — Few Understand Because Culture of Expertz
Specialization is destroying society. Consider this story.
Mike Saylor runs a company worth a bit over $5 billion, and they now own over $5 billion in Bitcoin. He moved almost all of MicroStrategy’s cash reserves into Bitcoin and then he took out debt to accumulate more.
This is something no one else is doing.
Sure, some entities, mainly private individuals, are putting small slices of their money into assorted cryptos, mainly for speculation. But Saylor, by contrast, used the vast majority of his huge company’s sizable wealth to buy only Bitcoin to protect his companies wealth.
How can he make such a bold decision?
Well, I’m listening to this very long interview where he explains why he likes Bitcoin, and the way he comes at it is revealing. He spent the first hour talking about catching fish in prehistoric societies and moves on to Roman political organization then later he gets into batteries and thermodynamics.
His argument about fish was that humans don’t need to engage in risky hunting since we are smart and could evolve to divert streams to eat salmon from a pond. To most people this would seem random and off topic. But it’s how Saylor understands Bitcoin which is another evolution and triumph of human ingenuity (whereas gold is just a rock).
He quoted Livy to explain how Rome had Consuls that rotated yearly which led to a resilient dynamic living organism that was super successful in staying as a Republic for hundreds of years. Another quality that the dynamic Bitcoin network mimics.
Then he got into how batteries continually lose stored energy and used it as a metaphor for how people need to store financial energy and protect it from highly damaging inflation.
The point is, these are arguments that no one could ever understand as accountants or commercial bankers or “merely” as CEOs. Saylor’s understanding of Bitcoin is based on his entire understanding of life, his ability to quote the classics and his work as a rocket engineer.
Saylor doesn’t come at his Bitcoin purchase as a dude glued to the Nasdaq ticker trying to squeeze a few million dollars out so he can buy a nice car. His conviction comes based on his entire life and his deep and wide education.
Most people *know* Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme while the rest are happy to speculate on it and hope they can grab the winning lottery ticket. There is still vanishingly little understanding of its deeper value and place in the world.
This is, in part, because our society loves specialization and pushes it on every “citizen” — or is that every serf? Every efficient worker? People get trained to be functioning cogs in the machine. There is breadth neither to life experience nor education.
That’s our modern society and it’s unfortunate: Exclusive specialization is disgusting, antithetical to being a man, and enemy to wisdom.
It’s kind of funny because while people nowadays consider themselves so super duper smart and dismiss Bitcoin, or misunderstand Bitcoin, many of our “ignorant” ancestors actually would have understood it. Bitcoin is indeed a novel engineering implementation, but the basic gist of a money that isn’t controlled by national government, is something Americans for most of America’s history would have understood very well.
Thomas Jefferson the Republican opposed the creation of a national bank whereas it was Alexander Hamilton the monarchist who supported it. Then Andrew Jackson the Democrat ended the central bank, which was something the people wanted, but America’s ruling class in general did not. The dangers of a central bank were arguably the second most controversial topic in American history after only slavery.
This is something a generalist would understand. A man who studies the classics. A person who can understand current engineering phenomena and project future outcomes through the lens of history. But it’s an idea that may not go over very well on someone who is following BREAKING NEWS headlines on CNN.
What Saylor shows is the power of man who experience life as a complete man. Where so many others are trapped inside of their narrow bubble, Saylor’s view covers much more. What some can’t understand, to others, is nothing less than necessary. The specialists are dead money versus the generalists.