저자: Bitcoin Magazine · 외국인
다듬은 글
Hi, I'm Natalie Brunell with Bitcoin Magazine and we are hearing from another billionaire Bitcoin bull. Famed fund manager and billionaire investor Bill Miller revealed in a recent interview that he has 50% of his personal wealth on Bitcoin. I think the average investor should ask himself or herself, what do you have in your portfolio that has this kind of track record number one is so is very very underpenetrated can provide a service of insurance against financial catastrophe that no one else can provide and uh and can go up 10 times or 50 times.
The answer is nothing. Now, if you're not familiar with Bill, his investment strategy is known for beating the market. He gained fame for beating the S&P 500 index for a record-breaking 15 years in a row from 1991 to 2005 as a fund manager at Leg Mason. He is so bullish on Bitcoin that he revealed in a video interview with WealthRack that he has half his assets in Bitcoin and most of the other half in Amazon.
Now, Miller said he started buying Bitcoin when it was around $200 in 2014, bought it over time, and then didn't buy for years until 2021 when Bitcoin hit new all-time highs and then fell to about $30,000. Now, he also has personally invested in companies tied closely to Bitcoin's price, like mining companies and Michael Sailor's Micro Strategy.
Miller said he sees Bitcoin as digital gold with a limited supply that has developed into a game-changing technology and an insurance policy against big government. Here's the interview clip that people have been sharing on social media. So, you know, why such confidence in it as an investment aside from the fact that it certainly has worked really well and more people are kind of jumping on the bandwagon.
There's several different several different ways to approach that. Yeah. Um, I I would say that that right now it's it's best thought of as digital gold. So, it's gold is, as people have said, a store of value for 5,000 years, right? And gold is what people typically fled to when the governments tried to uh, you know, inflate them out.
And in the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt confiscated everybody's gold in 1933. You had to turn it in or you went to jail. So, they can't confiscate your Bitcoin because there's nothing they you hold it securely. As long as you have an internet connection, you can you can uh send it somewhere instantaneously at very low very low cost.
And the reason I I the reason I I I like the insurance company analogy is because if you think about people talk about the intrinsic value, Bitcoin, this is a Warren Buffett argument that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It doesn't have any earnings. It'll never pay any dividends. Uh and so so how do you even think about something like that?
It it is a new technology. It's something that couldn't be done before. But in any case, the the answer that I have to that is, well, I mean, what's the what's the intrinsic value of that Mickey Manel baseball card that sold for $5.5 million? It's just cardboard and it it doesn't even have a legend.
It could be counterfeited very easily. Uh, or what's the intrinsic value of a Picasso painting, which just canvas and paint uh and uh you know, maybe a frame, but people will pay millions or tens of millions of dollars for it. And so it comes down at the very basic level for supply and demand. So, Bitcoin is the only economic entity where um the supply is unaffected by the demand.
So, even with gold, if gold, which is $1,800 today, if gold goes to $18,000, there will be a lot more gold mined because mines that are unprofitable will become profitable. And so, gold, which which accretes today, the production of gold is about equal about 1 and a half to 2% of the total value per year.
That's the same uh accretion that Bitcoin has currently that but this year 2022 I think will drop below 1.5% on that. So only only 21 million Bitcoin can ever be created or close to it. It doesn't matter if Bitcoin is 100,000 or or 20 million. There's only going to be that many of them. So, um, all you have to really believe is that the demand for Bitcoin will grow faster than one and a half%, you know, over the next number of years and the price inexurably will go up.
So, I' I've I've only recently been allowing myself to be described as a Bitcoin bull. I I used to tell people, they say, "Oh, you're a Bitcoin bull. You own a lot of Bitcoin." I'm like, "I do own a lot of it, but I'm actually a Bitcoin observer, and I'm observing its trajectory as a new technology." and comparing it to the trajectories of things like uh the printing press or the steam engine or the railroads or the automobile or electricity and and it's following that very uh uh not not predictable because it's not predictable certainly in the early days a well understood path for the adoption of new technologies and you know Stan I think it was Stan Ducken Miller uh said earlier in the year that and and and now he owns Bitcoin by the Um, but he said that Bitcoin was a solution in search of a problem.
And what I found amusing about that is every new technology is is a solution in in search of a problem because you you have a new technology and you're trying to figure out what you're going to do with it. And so, you know, when you when we created the internet, what are we going to do with that? So, uh, the defense department had had good uses for it, but it was tough for other other people to see.
And but now everybody can see what the value of the internet is. Same thing with the internal combustion engine which was very dangerous and all but now that's taken over the world and now we're going to move to to electricity. So all kinds of technologies have to grow into their uh grow into their potential and bitcoin is I guess if you want the theoretical answer to the question is that's the work of Brian Arthur Santa Fe Institute and and Stanford who is kind of the leading authority on what what he calls increasing returns economics and what he calls lock in and path dependence in the economy.
So his basic idea is that when technologies reach a certain dominance and they're the they're the leader, it's almost impossible to dislodge them even without a very superior technology and Bitcoin's there. Is that what that's what that's what I would say I and the other bulls believe. Okay. But why the outsized why 50% of your personal net worth?
I mean, I'm I'm assuming that you're the other 50% is in like Miller Value Funds or I I don't know how you've diversified and Well, actually actually close to the other 50% is in Amazon. All of the rest of the investments that I have are are ba are basically there to support margin debt because I always I'm typically always on margin, which means I can take a lot of volatility.
Now, I'm not obviously on uh deadly margin. that I'm on using regular reggg t mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar mar margin and I've got a fair amount of margin capacity but the rest of the all the stocks could eliminate all the margin debt and have a fair amount left over and then I'd have those those if I had to sell all those to pay off the debt then still have Bitcoin and Amazon.
Bill, can you explain to me the concept of Bitcoin as an insurance policy? There's 21 million shares of this insurance company outstanding. And every day that somebody wakes up and says, you know, I I need some insurance in case something, you know, in case the government seizes all the gold like they did back in 1933 or, you know, when when Afghanistan, we pulled out of Afghanistan, um, Western Union stopped remittances.
So, if you if you couldn't get money, uh, and it's still hard to get money in Afghanistan, uh, you were in serious trouble. Uh in Lebanon, the LRA has completely collapsed. Venezuela is a failed state and yet Bitcoin uh continues right along. That was your insurance policy against financial catastrophe of one sort or another.
And what did the Fed do when the pandemic shut down all parts of uh threatened to shut down all parts of the economy? the the financial markets came unglued and the normal relationships between uh cash and bonds and securities especially asset back securities got blown apart and the Fed had to increase the money supply by 25% to keep those things from collapsing as they did in 2008 right during that time the Bitcoin network functioned perfectly there was no run on it there was you know prices went down initially until people figured out wait a minute we've had a tremendous collapse here and the Bitcoin uh uh blockchain is functioning without a without a without any interference at all.
So I think that that explains it I think in a way that many people can understand if you want a little bit of financial insurance then then buy a bitcoin or or a part of a bitcoin. The argument I get most often is why not gold right which is considered to be an insurance policy against catastrophe historically.
So the the answer to that is um in my opinion anyway uh gold has gone from effect been around 5,000 years. So it's gone from just call make up a number and say a dime a nickel in today's uh parliament. And in 5,000 years it's gone from a nickel to $1,850. And in 10 years Bitcoin has gone from a nickel to $57,000.
So why would I own gold? Especially since gold in the last 10 years has gone down. In the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the best performing asset category in the world. So you recently marked 40 years in the investment business and you know how have how has the investment business changed as far as your approach is concerned and how have you changed?
How have you evolved over the last 40 years? The investment business is of course radically different from what it was 40 40 years ago when I got got involved in it. That one one major difference is interest rates at that point in time were the in the United States were the highest in US history and now they're not just the high the lowest in US history or close to it but for most countries in the world the lowest in 5,000 years.
So complete radical transformation of the fixed income markets. uh in 1982 when we started our when I was at Lake Mason we started our mutual fund the value trust the amount of money and I'm going from memory here the amount of money in actively managed mutual funds in the entire country was around $70 billion and at the peak of our assets in the in the value trust and and cognate institutional accounts we had $78 billion so more money than was in the industry at all when I got when I got into it um and but what what hasn't changed is that that human nature hasn't changed, fear and greed haven't changed.
And most importantly, we understand a lot more than we used to through the workings of social psychologists and behavioral finance theorists how large numbers of people behave under certain circumstances, well- definfined circumstances. And one of the things that we know, it's been proven over and over again, uh, is that the coefficient of loss to gain is 2 to1.
So a dollar's worth of loss in the market is twice as painful as a dollars worth of gain is pleasurable. And as Warren Buffett often says, u fear is contagious and spreads rapidly and confidence only returns slowly, one person at a time. But what that means is when you have very dramatic negative events that people tend to overreact to them and that those are they're rare, but they're perfect buying opportunities.
But I think those those are the principles that can be that aren't going to be changing. And that's why you can read Jesse Livermore's reminiscence of a stock operator or the Ben Grahams the intelligent investor and and profit from it even though the markets are are very very different from when when those books were published.
Comments 0