MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor is facing a wave of backlash from Bitcoiners after he said that audits are a bad idea.
Saylor — whose firm, now called Strategy, holds more than 567,000 Bitcoin worth around $63 billion — dismissed proof-of-reserves, a transparency practice that lets companies verify their crypto holdings onchain.
“It’s a bad idea,” Saylor said at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “If you publish your wallets, that’s an attack vector for hackers, nation-state actors, every type of troll imaginable.”
Saylor told sceptics to ask AI about the security concerns of publicly publishing Bitcoin addresses.
“It’ll write you a book,” he said, with “50 pages of security concerns.”
DL News checked with ChatGPT, and it returned a five-page outline.
Saylor deflects
Critics were quick to pounce.
“So he doesn’t advocate self custody and will not promote public audits or trustlessness,” crypto analyst Toby Cunningham said on X. “The guy has come full circle right back to the system Bitcoin was created to destroy.”
Wall Street trader Josh Mandell said on X that Saylor deflected.
“He talked around the simple question, ‘How exactly is it unsafe to provide on-chain tracking?’”