Michael Saylor Calls Bitcoin the World’s Reserve Asset but Not So Good for Buying a Cup of Coffee

Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of business intelligence company turned bitcoin hot stock MicroStrategy, thinks BTC is the best asset, better than the U.S. dollar. But he doesn’t think it works to buy coffee.

“You don’t want to pay for your coffee with your bitcoin, you want to pay for your coffee with a currency,” Saylor said in an interview with CoinDesk TV on Tuesday.

Saylor believes that bitcoin is the world reserve asset whereas the dollar is the world currency. That’s the main distinction between the two.

Saylor’s MicroStrategy has doubled its bitcoin holdings in the fiscal fourth quarter this year and now owns 121,044 bitcoins worth about $3.6 billion, which he says that he will likely “hold forever.”

Viewing bitcoin as an asset rather than as a currency also makes life easier from a regulatory perspective. “All of these regulations … they’re really regulations restraining your use of a digital asset as a currency rather than as a property,” Saylor said, adding that if you acknowledge that, it’s easy to see that the future of the industry is “quite bright.”

Saylor also addressed the issue of inflation, saying that bitcoin would provide the best hedge against inflation.

“There’s going to be volatility, but it seems to me that now we have universal acknowledgment that the world needs an inflation hedge,” he said. “So if you have bitcoin, don’t sell it.”

UPDATE (12/3/21 – 17:20 UTC): Clarifies language in first sentence that Michael Saylor thinks bitcoin is an asset, not a currency.