Broadly speaking, if you’ve watched one Michael Saylor interview, you’ve probably watched them all, but, at the same time, he’s always adding something relevant with each interview.
Saylor is always interesting to listen to, because it helps get perspective.
Saylor gets quoted quite often, but there’s a specific point he makes often that’s sometimes overlooked.
He recently made that point again speaking to Yahoo News.
“People who use FIAT as a store of value, we have a name for those people. We call them poor,” he said.
This is true.
A little over a decade ago, for a brief period of time, I thought it was a good idea to hold USD, CHF and GBP as an investment.
It was a bad idea, and then I had a worse idea on top of the bad idea I’d already had: I held physical banknotes, physical bills, not digital currency.
Fortunately, the potential damage was limited by a unique set of circumstances.
But here’s what happened, and here’s what would’ve happened if I hadn’t got rid of it all.
USD
Fortunately, I travelled to the US a few times and managed to spend all my dollars. Also, I should point out a rare feature that makes USD quite unique. In short, US dollar bills are always legal tender. You can’t say that about any other currency. This means that bills from 50 years ago are legal tender, same as bills from 50 days ago.
I still obviously lost to inflation, and remember that $1,000 in 2014 is equivalent to $757 today.
GBP
Between 2016 and 2019, I had to travel to the UK a lot for work, so that means I managed to spend all my GBP. BUT I should point out that GBP bills are updated regularly, and when a new version is issued, the old one is rendered obsolete extremely quickly. At one point, I literally had to travel to the UK to get rid of my bills because my bank, back home, in my homeland, wouldn’t take them.
Hadn’t I done that, I would now hold useless bills that are literally worth nothing. And it would infinitely hard to get a UK bank to change them for me.
CHF
At some point around 10 years ago, the CHF was briefly kept artificially pegged to the euro (it wasn’t 1:1, more like 1:1.2) but when the peg was removed, the value changed.
Not only that, because if you hold physical CHF bills from 10 years ago, you can’t spend them. Just like in the UK, Swiss Franc bills are updated often, and the current circulating bills aren’t the same as the one from ten years ago.
In fact, when I realised my bills had been rendered obsolete, I spent hours looking for an exchange office that would take the CHF 200 I was left with. I eventually found one who’d take the old bills I had, but lost about $40 due to fees.
Needless to say, you all know what 1 BTC was worth 10 years ago versus today.
bitcoinea 
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