Frank is beyond excellent: go read the full thing.
Mike resides in a refugee camp in Kenya, where I’d imagine it might be quite easy for him to psychologically give up, yet he spends his time studying finance and investing in bitcoin, because it seems that he believes that doing both will help improve his lot in life. (And I tend to agree with him!)
And a keynote presentation [by another Mike] I witnessed at Bitcoin MENA last week was an important reminder of why I hate this place sometimes.
See, Michael Saylor thinks bitcoin is nothing more than just “digital capital,” something that a major institution like the one he heads should own so that they can issue “digital credit” on top of it, which will ultimately underpin “digital money,” (which I’m assuming would be some sort of stablecoin pegged to the value of the digital credit — barf).
It’s not that I care about the bitcoin more than my life — it’s that I care about bitcoin existing as freedom money more than I care about my life, and I would never opt to sell it to someone who doesn’t see it as freedom money as a means to aid their effort to recreate fiat.