Michael Saylor Reveals The Time He Thought Bitcoin Was Like 'Online Gambling'

Bitcoin has had a rough run since it went through a halving on April 20, but BTC maximalist Michael Saylor believes the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency has a bright future ahead, mainly because he believes he has studied the digital coin enough to predict the role it will pay in the future economy. That doesn't mean he didn't doubt the digital asset in the beginning.

In a recent interview with Inteligência Financeira (Financial Intelligence), the MicroStrategy founder and executive chairman indicated that critics are skeptical about Bitcoin's potential because they haven't studied it enough.

"I've never met any critic that spent a hundred hours studying Bitcoin," he said, adding that he doesn't know anyone who has actually spent 100 hours studying the digital coin and became critical. When asked how many hours he studied Satoshi Nakamoto's creation, he revealed that it was a stage-by-stage process.

First, he read up on the digital asset for a few hours, then when he reached 20 to 30 hours of reading, he thought "maybe it's gonna go in the way of online gambling." He went on to think that the new fintech product will "get banned."

However, when he reached 100 hours of studying what has now become the world's largest cryptocurrency by market value, he started thinking that Bitcoin "is better than gold." Upon reaching 1,000 hours digging into the ins and outs of the still largely doubted digital currency, "I realized that this is probably the best asset," he said.

By the time he passed the 1,000-hour mark, he concluded that Bitcoin "is an instrument of economic empowerment."

Being one of the early adopters of Bitcoin and turning his company into a successful BTC story, Saylor's every word has become symbolic for many users of digital assets, specifically those who've joined the BTC adoption revolution.

Users on X (formerly Twitter) flooded the comments section of his post regarding the interview with optimism, most of them agreeing that dismissing Bitcoin early on is "an expensive mistake."

One user said "haters" of the digital currency were either bankers, "uneducated fools," or politicians. The latter statement has become more apparent in recent years as some lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have been vocally critical of the crypto sector.

Another user noted that learning the basics is indeed very time consuming and one has to be a "die hard" user of the digital asset to actually put effort into studying how the system works.

There were also a few who argued that Saylor's words had a tinge of "survivorship bias," while others came to his defense, saying history will someday "look back in awe" of the tech magnate's bullish views of Bitcoin.

While the popular digital asset has yet to bounce back to its glory days of $73,000 in March, Saylor appears hell-bent on maintaining MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy that has landed the tech firm a staggering BTC stash of over 214,000 Bitcoins as of March 2024.