SAYLOR: BITCOIN GREW UP — SELF-CUSTODY AND FOUNDER WORSHIP ARE OPTIONAL NOW

Saylor just told the maximalists their rulebook is history. Bitcoin, he says, started as pocket cash, grew into digital gold, and now it’s digital capital — something you can hold as a coin, a bond, a stock, or a slice of a company balance sheet. He isn’t asking permission from the founder-worship crowd who treat cold storage as gospel. Self-custody should be a choice, he argues, not a commandment, and Bitcoin belongs sitting inside banks, funds, and public companies right alongside cash and bonds. Worth saying plainly: Saylor runs Strategy, a company that sells six different bitcoin-linked stocks and bonds, so a world where owning paper counts as owning Bitcoin is a world where his own shelf of products gets bigger. That doesn’t make him wrong about the coin’s supply or its ceiling. It just means the sermon and the sales pitch share a pulpit. Twenty-one million stays twenty-one million whether the coin sits in a cold wallet or a corporate vault. But paper is a promise, and promises answer to boardrooms. Owning the stock is not owning the coin, and the coin doesn’t have a shareholder meeting.