As artificial intelligence accelerates the shift toward a digital economy, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor is calling for a new rights framework to govern how individuals and companies create, own, transfer, and use digital assets.
Saylor argues that clear protections for digital ownership, financial privacy, competition and everyday payments will be essential to ensuring that digital assets can support the next generation of economic growth.
In his view, individuals and companies must be free to create, issue, custody, transfer, and use digital assets without unnecessary barriers.
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Only then can privacy be protected, competition flourish, and people build lasting wealth in an era increasingly shaped by digital intelligence.
Saylor argues that the right to use a digital asset must extend to ordinary economic activity. He says buying dinner or paying for a routine service should not require consumers to become tax accountants.
Under current U.S. tax rules, spending a digital asset can trigger the need to calculate and report a capital gain or loss. Saylor believes this administrative burden can discourage people from using digital assets for everyday payments.
He has called on policymakers to introduce a meaningful de minimis exemption for ordinary digital asset transactions. In his view, a $20 or $200 threshold is too low for modern commerce, particularly when routine expenses such as a family dinner can easily exceed $200.
Saylor also distinguishes between an exemption based on the taxable gain and one based on the total value of a purchase.
He argues that any relief should be large enough to cover ordinary spending, automatically adjusted for inflation, and simple enough to eliminate unnecessary transaction-by-transaction calculations and recordkeeping.
He maintains that tax exemptions and government reporting thresholds address different issues, but both should account for the time and economic realities of everyday users.
As a strong advocate for Bitcoin, he sees digital assets as an important component of an economy increasingly operated by artificial intelligence.
According to Saylor, this current emerging economy will require financial infrastructure capable of operating continuously. Money and capital will need to move at the speed of software, rather than being constrained by traditional banking hours and human-operated systems.
He argues that much of today’s financial infrastructure is built around human identities, interfaces and working schedules. As individuals and businesses delegate more activities to AI agents, they will need practical tools that allow those agents to transact on their behalf.
That could include digital wallets, programmable payments, transferable assets and financial services that software can access directly.
Saylor believes Bitcoin and other digital assets are naturally suited to this environment because they can be recognized, transferred, and used digitally across the internet.
An AI agent operating globally, he argues, needs access to capital that can move digitally rather than relying on physical assets or financial transactions that can take days, weeks or months to complete.
For Saylor, the combination of digital intelligence and digital assets could become an important foundation for the next wave of economic activity.
He has called instead for a clear framework of digital rights that begins with the ability to act.
That framework centers on five fundamental freedoms. People and companies should be free to create new digital assets, financial instruments, and applications.
Notably, as regards tokenization, Saylor holds similar promise only if it expands the rights of the owner rather than locking assets into the same closed circles of intermediaries.
He says an investor should be able to hold a tokenized security, move it to a preferred provider, and access competitive markets for custody and credit.
Saylor has tied these ideas to a broader ambition, making it practical for millions of new companies to raise capital. Digital intelligence will automate work and render some products obsolete.
Prosperity will depend on the speed with which new businesses can form and grow. Digital tokens can lower the cost and complexity of capital formation, provided rules remain clear, proportionate, and open to models that do not yet exist.
Protecting existing business models while making it difficult to finance their successors, he warns, leaves the economy poorly prepared for technological change.
Throughout, his recommendation remains consistent. The age of digital assets and digital intelligence needs a bill of digital rights, not a bill of restrictions. Regulators can lead by removing unnecessary barriers and establishing clear paths for new products.
In his vision, freedom is not an abstract principle. It is the practical condition that allows people to create, compete, and build wealth.