Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor headlined the sold-out Bitcoin 2021 Miami conference. Here are their 12 best quotes from the event.
Table of Contents
- Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor were among the headliners at the star-studded Bitcoin 2021 Miami conference.
- The pair discussed ESG concerns, how they got into bitcoin, and why they believe it is the digital currency of the future.
- Insider compiled the best quotes from the Twitter and Microstrategy chief execs.
- Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey and Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor headlined the sold-out Bitcoin 2021 Miami conference on Friday along with a star-studded lineup that included everyone from Tony Hawk to Floyd Mayweather Jr.
In front of 12,000 attendees, with thousands more watching online, the two discussed why they are so bullish on bitcoin, how they got started in the business, their thoughts on recent ESG concerns, and much more.
Here are Saylor and Dorsey’s 12 best quotes from the interviews, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
Jack Dorsey
- “For me, bitcoin changes absolutely everything. What I’m drawn to most about it is the ethos, what it represents. The conditions that created it are so rare and so special and so precious and I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on. I don’t think there’s anything more enabling for people around the world.”
- “Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make it more accessible to everyone is how I want to spend the rest of my life. If I were not at Square or Twitter I’d be working on bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for bitcoin. But I think both companies have a role to play.”
- “They’re missing everything. They’re not getting out of New York, they’re not getting out of the country, they’re not talking to people. Go to Nigeria for one day and see the struggle that people have to put up with, with their government and with their money. Go to Ghana that has a bunch of transplants from all over the continent and you witness the same thing every single day. Go to India and you’ll see the same.”
- “Everything about it is why we’re into it. There’s nothing else that compares to it. And we have no interests other than making sure we are building a native currency for the internet and helping in every way that we can. So all the other coins to me, don’t factor in at all.”
- “You just look at the economics of it and, you know, ultimately miners have to make a profit and getting cheap renewable energy maximizes their potential for profit, it’s really that simple. I thought I had some agreement with some notable figures out there and then that seemed to change in a matter of a few weeks…but I believe fully that bitcoin over time and today does incentivize more renewable energy…and gives people more freedom to convert unused, wasted power into something that actually creates value for billions of people around the world.”
- “That realization that we finally have a currency that can be traded at any single point on the planet is pretty incredible and what that enables going forward is pretty mind-blowing and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that that happens.”
Michael Saylor
- “When I discovered bitcoin I thought this is digital gold on a big tech monetary network and it’s going to grow by a factor of a hundred. Then I thought, well, I should buy as much as I can…I was buying it and I was thinking I have to buy as much as I can, as fast as I can or someone will figure this out and I won’t be able to.”
- “Bitcoin is the apex property of the human race. It’s the first time we figured out how to create true property that you can take possession of with full custodial rights that’s least likely to be impaired, that’s most mobile….bitcoin is truly a seminal invention of the human race because for the first time in history we can grant property rights to 8 billion people.”
- “I think bitcoin is an extraordinary, disruptive, beneficial technology to the whole energy industry. As I studied it, it became clear that it’s the highest value use of intermittent energy. It’s the highest value use of renewable energy. It’s the highest value use of wasted or stranded energy. And it’s just the highest value use of energy, period. It’s the solution to developing power plants in remote locations, to driving up efficiency of plants and driving down costs…I think as the world understands it, they’re going to embrace it.”
- “What I was doing with bitcoin was, I was saying I don’t want to decapitalize the company. I want to keep the capital or grow the capital, but I want to put an asset on the balance sheet. The big breakthrough is I can convert my cash from a liability to an asset and then we realized that if that asset is going to go up by more than 10% a year and you can borrow money at 5% or four, or three, or two, then you should pretty much borrow as much money as you can and flip it into the asset.”
- “Bitcoin links together 8 billion people, links together a hundred million companies, it synchronizes the world across political jurisdictions, and it returns rationality to the entire financial system, and it returns freedom and property rights to the entire human race.”
- “We say bitcoin is hope. Bitcoin fixes everything…that certainly was the case with our stock….it imbued life into the company…morale was dramatically boosted. We just had the best first quarter we’ve had in a decade.”