Michael Saylor said on Tuesday that Bitcoin has won, and that its gravest danger now comes from within its own ranks. His company, Strategy, has not bought a single BTC in five consecutive weeks.
Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham dissected the pause. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) has built a $3.75 billion cash reserve instead. Two clocks are now running at once, and they point in opposite directions.
Why Michael Saylor Is Warning About Bitcoin Now
The timing is not accidental. that would cap the size of arbitrary data fields in Bitcoin transactions. Written by developer Dathon Ohm and shipped in Bitcoin Knots, it began miner signaling on December 1, 2025.
Miners have largely ignored it. That does not stop it.
The proposal’s own deployment schedule sets a mandatory lock-in window for around August 2026. Once that window opens, blocks that fail to signal are rejected as invalid. Lock-in becomes guaranteed. Activation follows two weeks later, and the rules expire on their own about a year after that.
In other words, Saylor is not arguing against something that needs to win a vote. He is arguing against something with a calendar. That window is days away.
What Saylor Actually Said About Consensus Rules
The Strategy executive chairman framed Bitcoin’s consensus rules as a constitution. They define property, scarcity, settlement, and power. Rewriting them to suit any faction, he argued, attacks every participant alive today and every one who comes later.
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He named three targets:
- BIP-110 censors valid fee-paying transactions in his reading.
- Covenants create fresh attack surface.
- Larger blocks thin out blockspace scarcity and raise validation costs.
His central technical claim concerns miner revenue. Block subsidies halve every 210,000 blocks. Fees must therefore carry more of the security budget over time. Weakening the fee market, he said, disarms the network.
The other side of this argument is well staffed. BIP-110’s backers say arbitrary data embedding burdens node operators and crowds out payments.
Saylor is not the only critic, and critics do not agree with each other. Blockstream chief executive Adam Back also opposes the proposal. His targeted the lowered 55% activation threshold, not censorship.
Saylor’s earlier BIP-110 warning called the proposal Bitcoin’s biggest self-inflicted risk. The dispute has split Bitcoin developers for months.
Why Did Strategy Stop Buying Bitcoin?
Because equity became cheaper to sell than conviction was to abandon.
A Form 8-K filing dated July 27 confirmed a $525 million addition to the dollar reserve. The total reached $3.75 billion, which the company frames as 2.1 years of dividend coverage against roughly $1.76 billion in annual preferred obligations.
The money came from shares, not coins. Strategy sold $544.5 million of MSTR stock last week. Roughly $467 million and $263.5 million came from share sales in the two weeks before that, or about $1.26 billion across three weeks.
It sold those shares cheap. MSTR trades near $96.66, down about 76% from its 52-week high of $414.36. Every dollar raised this way costs far more equity than it would have a year ago.
How Far Behind Is the 1 Million BTC Target?
Strategy has said it wants 1 million BTC by the end of 2026. It holds 843,775. The gap is 156,225 BTC.
About 22 weeks remain in the year. Closing the gap would require roughly 7,000 BTC per week, or near $447 million weekly at current prices. The company is buying none.
Why It Matters for BTC and MSTR Holders
Strategy’s average cost sits near $75,494 per coin. Bitcoin trades around $63,817, down roughly 1.5% over 24 hours and about 49% below its October 2025 peak of $126,080. That leaves the stack close to $9.9 billion underwater on paper.
BTC would need to climb about 18% to return the position to break-even. The Bitcoin price today gives that no help.
The preferred shares explain the urgency. STRC trades near $88.86, still about 11% below its $100 par despite a dividend raised to 12% on July 1 and an authorized buyback programme.
That pressure on STRC shaped the Digital Credit Capital Framework announced on June 29, which cleared buybacks and up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin sales.
What to Watch Over the Next 30 Days
Three dated events sit inside the window.
- BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window is expected to open in August, which would guarantee lock-in regardless of miner support.
- Strategy files weekly. A sixth consecutive week without a purchase would extend the longest pause of its accumulation era.
- With $3.75 billion banked, the company has removed the near-term need to touch its $1.25 billion Bitcoin monetization authorization.
Both positions can hold at once. One defends a protocol meant to last a century. The other has to fund a dividend next quarter. The tension is not hypocrisy so much as a scheduling problem, and the schedule is about to get crowded.