It appears that duplicated articles cannot be scheduled

It’s the year 2045. Digital assets move at the speed of light. AI agents interact millions of times a second, using bitcoin as a base currency. Bitcoin is now a $200 trillion asset class, a settlement layer for the AI Age of the Internet.

This is the future imagined by bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy (MSTR). Saylor pioneered the bitcoin corporate treasury – turning his flailing software firm into a Nasdaq-listed $85 billion leveraged bitcoin powerhouse.

CoinDesk recently sat down with Saylor, Bitcoin’s ultimate maximalist, for a two-hour interview to break down his vision for global bitcoin domination.

Since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, bitcoin has maintained a 26% gain, peaking at a $2.1 trillion market cap, and touching a January all time high of $109,000. Strategy, a Wall Street proxy for bitcoin, remains strong with about a 50% gain, despite dropping approximately 30% from November highs amid a broader decline in U.S. equities, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield, and oil.

The United States went from regulating crypto by enforcement and covertly de-banking digital asset firms, dubbed “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” by the industry, to declaring that the U.S. will become a bitcoin superpower and the crypto capital of the world. For Saylor, the sea change means doors that were previously closed are opening. Governments and traditional institutional investors around the world that used to be afraid of engaging with digital assets are now curious.

Saylor said he is fielding invitations to speak at all the elite gatherings: South America’s 100 wealthiest families, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, Morgan Stanley’s prestigious tech conference, CPAC, and the White House. He has gone from encouraging corporations to adopt bitcoin treasuries to advising nation states on establishing strategic bitcoin reserves.

Bitcoin has reached “escape velocity,” he said, because once the U.S. government begins to acquire it aggressively, the U.S. will become a beneficiary and force every country to adopt bitcoin as the global capital.

“It becomes a fait accompli,” said Saylor. “It's one of those geopolitical moves that when you embrace the network, you force all of your allies first to adopt it, and then all your enemies have to adopt it.”

U.S. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve

President Trump’s executive order to establish a U.S. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve represents a milestone in realizing bitcoin’s manifest destiny. At one point, the U.S. held about 400,000 bitcoins, but sold half of it for proceeds of $366 million. Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks lamented that the cost to American taxpayers for selling this bitcoin prematurely is $17 billion at current market value.

The executive order directs the Secretary of the Treasury to never sell the United States’ bitcoin and to develop budget neutral ways to acquire more bitcoin. It further directs the creation of a digital asset stockpile, a portfolio of seized crypto assets that can be managed and rebalanced as necessary.

At President Trump’s White House Digital Assets Summit on March 7, Saylor proposed that the U.S. acquire 5%-25% of the total bitcoin supply by 2035 that could generate an estimated $100 trillion in economic value by 2045.

When asked about this proposal, Bo Hines, Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk the Trump administration wants the U.S. to acquire as much bitcoin “as we can possibly get” and is considering various creative methods, including Senator Cynthia Lummis’ (R-Wyo) proposal to use Federal reserve earnings and gold certificates to buy bitcoin.

As the U.S. embraces bitcoin, worldwide banks will inevitably follow.

“ Pandora's box has been opened,” said Saylor. “When bitcoin spreads… and there's a trillion dollars of digital capital in the banking system, it won't just be in the U.S. It's a virus. And so the virus spreads. And in this case, that means you're going to have hundreds of thousands of banks and trillions of dollars that are held by a billion people.”