Saylor questions Bitcoin's proof of reserves, a security trap disguised as a transparency gimmick.

At the Bitcoin 2025 conference on May 26, Michael Saylor's speech was quite shocking, as he unexpectedly raised sharp questions about the industry's popular "Proof of Reserve" (PoR).

The cause is the question from Blockware Solutions Chief Analyst Mitchell Askew: Does Strategy plan to publicly disclose its Bitcoin cold wallet address so that outsiders can verify its billions of dollars in assets?

In the end, Saylor didn't follow everyone's expectations to talk about "supporting transparency"; instead, he criticized the currently popular "Proof of Reserves (PoR)" quite sharply, and his viewpoint was really incisive.

Mr. Saylor illustrated the risks in a vivid analogy, saying that making institutional wallets public would be like sticking children's home addresses, bank accounts, and phone numbers on a wall in the hope that it would make the family safer.

At the same time, in the eyes of Saylor, the "complete transparency" praised by many retail investors is, in fact, a "breeding ground for various malicious attacks such as hackers and state actors."

He also invited the audience to initiate a generative AI thought experiment, asking the AI to list the security issues that would arise once the wallet is made public, and it could write a fifty-page book on security issues.

Saylor pointed out that this is a structural risk, as once the cold wallet address is exposed, the flow of funds becomes completely transparent, allowing malicious parties such as hackers to trace the arrival time and exploit "zero-day" algorithm vulnerabilities for precise attacks.

In other words, the current PoR mechanism, which has not been optimized for security, not only fails to build a solid foundation of trust but also, in an intangible way, undermines the security protection system of issuers, custodians, exchanges, and investors.

Saylor pointed out the fatal flaw of the PoR mechanism, stating that verifying assets without checking liabilities is meaningless. For example, "an asset of 63 billion Bitcoin corresponding to a liability of 100 billion renders the proof of reserves worthless."

In addition, Saylor also proposed a systematic solution. The authenticity of assets would be audited by the Big Four accounting firms, the mortgage situation would be verified, information would be disclosed through the processes of publicly listed companies, and the executive team would bear legal responsibilities. This is the compliance verification method recognized by the capital market, rather than simply pursuing on-chain transparency.

#比特币储备证明 # On-chain Transparency