Strategy founder Michael Saylor: The fact that anyone can issue a cryptocurrency does not mean there is no reason to buy Bitcoin

Since leading the company then known as MicroStrategy in its first purchase of Bitcoin in 2020, Michael Saylor has repeatedly used analogies involving language and protocols to explain Bitcoin’s position. He has publicly referred to Bitcoin as the “language of money” and in multiple interviews has pointed out that human civilization converges on dominant protocols (such as English or the Arabic numeral system) because of network effects formed after influential participants choose them, rather than because the protocol itself is easy to replicate. After the company was renamed Strategy in 2025, Saylor continued to promote this framework as chairman, positioning Bitcoin as digital capital rather than merely a token that can be arbitrarily issued.

Strategy’s capital path began in August 2020 with the purchase of about $250 million worth of Bitcoin in cash, after which it mainly continued adding to its holdings through the issuance of common stock (MSTR) and other capital tools. As of mid-October 2026, the company disclosed holdings of 848,517 bitcoins, about 4% of the fixed supply of 21 million, with cumulative cost of about $64 billion and an average purchase price of about $75,446. Funding has mainly come from equity financing and some cash reserves, and the company has also issued preferred stock (such as STRC) and conducted buybacks to manage digital credit and balance sheet structure. This path has made Saylor’s personal remarks and the company’s actual holdings mutually reinforcing.

A similar case can be seen in the status of English as a global business language: although anyone can invent a new language or dialect, English has become the de facto default protocol thanks to Britain’s historical military and commercial expansion, and later the technology and financial systems led by the United States; even if a new language is more efficient in some local settings, it is difficult to displace the existing user network. What Bitcoin shares with this is that its liquidity, security, and institutional adoption (including by large holders such as Strategy) form the value of the existing network; what differs is that Bitcoin’s issuance rules are fixed by a public protocol and cannot be arbitrarily changed by a single entity, whereas language rules can evolve through social practice.

What this statement reinforces is that Bitcoin’s value does not depend on whether it can be created, but on the network effects and stock of capital commitments that have already formed. For Strategy, this reinforces its position as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin: continued accumulation further deepens network stickiness, making newly created cryptocurrencies, even if technically issuable, face the threshold of competing with existing liquidity, institutional adoption, and security budgets. Indicators to watch include future changes in the share of corporate holdings and the concentration of liquidity in Bitcoin relative to other crypto assets.

ABAB News · Cognitive Laws

1. Being able to invent a protocol does not mean being able to replace the dominant position of an existing user network.
2. The dominant position of both language and digital assets depends on the choices of influential participants rather than the difficulty of creation.