Bitcoin OG Bill Barhydt, who snagged Bitcoin below $5, isn’t mincing words about Michael Saylor’s grand Bitcoin gesture: he thinks it’s a billion-dollar blunder. The Abra CEO ripped into Saylor’s idea to bury his personal Bitcoin stash in an “unsendable wallet” forever, calling the strategy utterly senseless.
In a recent Supply Shock podcast chat with Pete Rizzo, Barhydt, known for his early Bitcoin enthusiasm, didn’t hold back his frustration. Saylor, MicroStrategy’s chair and a mega Bitcoin bull, had hinted at locking away over 17,000 of his own BTC for eternity in a CoinDesk interview.
Saylor’s rationale? He sees it as a gift to the Bitcoin ecosystem, shrinking the circulating supply and potentially juicing up the value of everyone else’s holdings. Barhydt isn’t buying it. “His perspective is that this is a gift to the Bitcoin community because if you lower the denominator and the numerator, it helps everybody else in terms of the purchasing power. My take is, the Bitcoin community does not need that gift,” Barhydt stated plainly.
Before Abra, his crypto wealth management platform, Barhydt sharpened his teeth at Goldman Sachs and Netscape. His Bitcoin street cred is rock solid: he delivered the first-ever Bitcoin TED Talk back when a single coin cost about the same as a latte.