Thoughts on Saylor

Cross-posted from stacker.news

Will Sutton, September 13, 2022

A lot of Saylor's Bitcoin concepts, I see originating in a set of ideas that were prominent around MIT in the mid 1980's at the intersection of tech/engineering/operations industry and was adjacent to the failed "cybernetics" project. In this intellectual framework, a key opportunity for the future firm was by collecting and analyzing data at the individual level, corporate outlays and decision would be more efficient. The computing power necessary for this was just beginning to be feasible. I think Saylor was influenced by this view given he is the ceo of a business intelligence vendor doing just this.

As his own firm's product offering hit a ceiling to the value it would deliver from micro-economic measurements (e.g. trying to track inventory level changes) I think he became influenced by the idea of Bitcoin doing something similar, but in the invisible hand manner of pricing in changes and shocks to energy cost, risk preference etc across time and space into one number. In Saylor's view, no firm, of business intelligence software could outcompete the Bitcoin protocol for discovering information and properly factoring it a fair market value.

It's a good sign when people take the idea of Bitcoin, and see in it another idea that they admire and trust. I think the problem you mention is that Saylor's school of thought and lingo are not exactly a well known or admired idea by the vast majority of people considering buying bitcoin.

In my opinion, Saylor is onto something insightful with his "wall of energy" hypothesis, but he hasn't been able to quantify it. The analogy I would make is just as the finance profession prices firms by a discounted set of projected cashflows, a blockchain token could be valued by its projected future hashrate. Stated another way: A bitcoin has value 1.) if and only if producers continue to mine it in the future, 2.) the growth in value is proportional to the growth in the hashrate in the long run.