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Warren Buffett vs. Michael Saylor

[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]:

BIT & COIN:  Merging Digitality and Physicality

Michael Saylor criticizes Warren Buffett holding $325B in cash:

“They are destroying $3B a month in shareholder capital. They are generating a 3% after tax yield at best and the cost of capital is 15%. Take 12% negative real yield, $325B times 12% is what the shareholders are paying for that.”

“If I had an hour alone with Buffet in a calm environment, I’d walk out and he’d say that this Bitcoin $BTC thing is a pretty good idea, Charlie would’ve liked it and we’re going to buy some.”

What Michael Saylor doesn’t say is that, if all investors are like Warren Buffett, businesses would have to be more disciplined to create more real value in order to attract investment (so that Buffett does not have to park as much cash uninvested); but if all investors were like Michael Saylor, the global economy would soon be overtaken by a metastasizing cancer of Ponzi schemes like BTC that does not create real value but only extract money and resources from other parts of the healthy productive economy.

Saylor likes to describe BTC as a thermodynamic system using an interesting analogy (which is in fact a big reason why his explanations of BTC tend to be impressive and persuasive to many).

However, what people should understand is that the global economy as part of humanity is not merely mechanical. It has two additional higher levels of values. Specifically, the global economy has the following three different layers of properties and values:

  1. Mechanical
  2. Systemic
  3. Moral.

Try to compare a healthy cell with a cancer cell on a purely mechanical level only. One would have a hard time choosing a preference. But when you move higher to the level of the whole system, there’s a huge difference.

Then, ultimately, there is also the moral level that has to do with the meaning of life rather than just mechanics and systems. That’s where the most fundamental differentiation exists. But this is also where people tend to miss. The crypto community, especially the BTC “digital gold” believers, have worked hard in the past to promulgate certain mechanical views of value but misunderstand the systemic value and are completely devoid of any sense of moral values.

(See Value, its definition, creation and transaction; and the idea of digital gold.)

[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]:

BIT & COIN:  Merging Digitality and Physicality

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