As GameStop buys bitcoin, Michael Saylor vows to burn his own private keys

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) founder Michael Saylor has had a busy week. In addition to a 6,911-bitcoin (BTC) purchase for his company and the shocking announcement that he intends to burn most of his personal BTC prior to his death in a sort of Bitcoin Giving Pledge, he has also been boasting about a BTC announcement from GameStop.

Posing for a photo beside CEO Ryan Cohen, Saylor cheered as GameStop — the world’s second-largest meme stock behind Tesla — unanimously approved the purchase of BTC for its corporate treasury.

Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin Giving Pledge

In yesterday’s meandering video interview, in addition to applauding GameStop, Saylor claimed that enlightened Bitcoiners could “leave all our money to the human race” in a final act “true to Satoshi Nakamoto’s principles.”

Spelling it out for confused viewers, the billionaire promised to burn his own private keys before his death and “make everyone in the network much richer and more powerful.”

He said the reduction of BTC’s supply would reward people who believed his message during his lifetime. He ended his speech by saying, “We’re all in this together — from now to eternity. That’s my legacy.”

To put Saylor’s promise into perspective, historian Pete Rizzo estimated the value of his 17,000 coins to be around $1.5 billion at today’s prices. 

Read more: Michael Saylor will pay 18% dividends to buy bitcoin if he has to

However, if Saylor’s prediction of BTC rallying from today’s $1.7 trillion to a $200 trillion market cap by 2045, that 17,000-BTC burn would be worth somewhere in the region of $173 billion.

Tracing burned bitcoin

Saylor only has the unilateral authority to burn private keys to his own BTC. The 506,137 corporate BTC at Strategy are collectively owned by MSTR shareholders.

To clarify, Saylor may not and did not claim he would burn BTC owned by Strategy.

For reference purposes, various developers have created dashboards to track burned BTC. According to on-chain metrics from 2015, at least 2,673 BTC have burned — most in the 2014 Counterparty creation of XCP.

A far larger number of private keys controlling up to 3.8 million BTC, per a 2023 report from Unchained Capital, could be lost yet are not provably burned.

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