Michael Saylor did not come to Binance Blockchain Week to comfort nervous investors. He came to remind them why Bitcoin exists.
While markets obsess over price swings and social media swings between euphoria and panic, Saylor offered a fundamentally different lens: volatility is not a flaw in Bitcoin, it is the engine of its evolution. In his view, Bitcoin is not a product to be managed, but a force to be harnessed.
“Smoke comes from fire,” Saylor remarked. “And without fire, there is no civilization.”
The analogy is more than theatrical. It reveals how Saylor sees Bitcoin not as a speculative instrument, but as industrial infrastructure.
Raw, powerful, and dangerous only when misunderstood.
Saylor spoke exclusively to Coin Headlines and when asked if Bitcoin could go up in smoke, he replied:
“We put fires in our automobiles and our trains. Without fire and smoke there would be no civilization. We can harness it for the better.”
Stop trading Bitcoin and start building on it
Saylor’s advice to builders was blunt, don’t waste time trying to tame Bitcoin’s volatility, instead learn to use it.
Rather than trying to smooth Bitcoin into traditional financial behaviors, he urged entrepreneurs to engineer systems that absorb its intensity. His proposed tool was digital credit instruments.
“If you’re a builder then harness the volatility to build something better like digital credit and if you don’t want the volatility then buy the digital credit because they will perform much better than any conventional credit.”
Unlike holding Bitcoin directly, Saylor believes digital credit products can convert Bitcoin’s wild short-term swings into stable long-term utility. These instruments can act like financial shock absorbers: removing volatility at the surface level while preserving Bitcoin’s underlying monetary power.
Traditional credit systems depend on fragile currencies, inflation-prone balance sheets, and political decision-making. Digital credit, by contrast, can be neutral, algorithmic, and global, an entirely new financial layer built on top of Bitcoin’s immutability.
In simple terms, Bitcoin is the base layer, while credit is the application layer. And whoever masters that layer, masters the next financial era.
Don’t be afraid of change
Critics often frame Bitcoin as unstable, risky, or on the verge of collapse. Saylor rejects the narrative outright.
What people call “smoke,” he explained, is merely the by-product of transformation.
Civilizations did not avoid building engines because of exhaust. They engineered around it. Civilization didn’t reject airplanes because fuel burns. It learned how to control combustion.
Bitcoin is no different. Volatility is simply the market learning how to price a new form of money that is, not issued by a government, not controlled by banks, not inflating away, not subject to seizure, and not bound by borders
When humanity first electrified cities, grids failed. When we built aircraft, crashes were inevitable. When we introduced the internet, it was chaotic. Yet no serious person suggested abandoning the technology altogether.
Bitcoin, in Saylor’s framework, is still in its industrial revolution phase, messy, loud and necessary.
“Are you selling?” No, he’s keeping the Bitcoin
When I asked him directly whether he is selling his Bitcoin holdings, Michael Saylor gave an unequivocal answer: “No. I’m keeping the Bitcoin.” It was not delivered as a slogan or a piece of hype, but as a statement of strategy.
For Saylor, Bitcoin is not an asset to be traded or inventory to be liquidated, but infrastructure to be built upon, comparable to bridges, power stations, and highways that underpin entire systems rather than serve as short-term commodities.
Saylor is redefining the crypto game
What distinguished Michael Saylor’s appearance was not optimism, but positioning. He did not forecast charts or promote returns, but instead sought to reframe the entire conversation around Bitcoin’s role.
In his view, Bitcoin is not a speculative bet but a civilizational upgrade, and its volatility is not a system flaw but evidence of a world-changing technology taking shape. As Saylor framed it, history does not arrive quietly, and Bitcoin, he suggested, is not arriving slowly either.