Airdrop Army

Michael Saylor, the Bitcoin maxinator himself, just pulled a 180 and sent ripples through the hodlerverse. On October 21, in a chat with reporter Madison Reidy, Saylor advised plebs to park their satoshis with “too big to fail” suits instead of the sacred self-custody mantra he once venerated. So, yeah, a total flippening on his previous stance.

Saylor was all about the hard wallets back in the day, but now he’s preaching that Bitcoiners ain’t risking anything by handing over their sats to centralized, tradfi behemoths. That statement landed with the grace of a broken ledger in the decentral crowd, especially the ones still rocking their seed phrases.

Self-Custody No More?

This time, Saylor dished out the spiciest take: dismissing the “paranoid crypto-anarchists” who worry about state-sanctioned confiscation of Bitcoin. When he got asked if the U.S. might snatch up Bitcoin like they did with gold in 1933, Saylor called it pure FUD, nothing but a “myth and trope.” He says there’s zero to fear, but those still HODLing hardware wallets didn’t take the bait.

Cypherpunks and old-school hodlers were far from impressed. Sina, head honcho at 21st Capital, clapped back hard, saying Saylor’s trying to relegate Bitcoin to “investment petrock” status, erasing its currency creds in one stroke. A decentralized nightmare, but not for Saylor.

Decentralization or Saylorcorp?

Simon Dixon, of “Bank to the Future” fame, speculated that Saylor’s motives weren’t exactly clean. Dixon figures Saylor’s pushing the custodial narrative ’cause MicroStrategy’s got bigger fish to fry. What’s better than self-custody for a firm angling to turn itself into a full-blown Bitcoin bank? Not much, apparently, if you’re trying to drop collateralized loans and stack more sats.

Meanwhile, John Carvalho, CEO of Synonym, dropped some serious shade, saying, “If Bitcoin was hope, Saylor’s gone full fiat-core.” The hypocrisy meter is off the charts. Back in the day, Saylor used to tell people to memorize their 12-word seed phrase and tell the regulators to “f*** themselves.” But now, his U-turn on decentralization has crypto anarchists doubling down on self-custody, wondering if Saylor’s just selling them down the river for some institutional gain.