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Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

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Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#51

Post by dharma1 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #39
dharma1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, one side (people with coins) is highly incentivised to preach the gospel. people seem to generally have no shortage of opinions about money/wealth, and hot takes about the topic du jour

And the other side (people with fiat) are incentivized to preach that gospel as well, as the value of their tokens continues to decrease relative to crypto. Disclaimer: I actually dislike bitcoin (and other proof of work cryptos) very much, but the jury's still out on which side is more correct in their criticism of the other.

and the people without much of either token also have an opinion :)

PoS ledgers seem like a better design, but they alone don't solve very uneven/concentrated token distributions that you end up with every monetary system

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#52

Post by arcticbull »

paulgb wrote: post #38

At today's price, MSTR owns about $14B of Bitcoin and has a market cap of almost $30B. Has anyone here actually used MicroStrategy, the product/service offering? Is the software company behind it worth the implied $16B, or is MSTR essentially just a Bitcoin ETF with a really bad fee ratio? (I’m not even counting the $2B debt on their books) Would I be dumb to do a long BTC / short MSTR pair trade?

MSTR has had declining nominal revenue (let alone real-dollar) basically every quarter since 2014. [1]

Remember too that Saylor popped the 1999 tech bubble when he was accused by the SEC of cooking the MicroStrategy company books. Settled for millions dollars in fines, and should have at that point been banned from ever running a public company, but hey, this is America. When they restated their books, he lost more money in a single day than anyone in history. [2]

Not sure he's really someone to be taken seriously. He's shown some questionable judgement, to put it mildly. Desperation will do that to you.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSTR/microstrategy...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/15/business/microstrategy-ch...

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#53

Post by Tubeee »

mandevil wrote: post #24
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

I had always thought of BTC in terms of an alternate currency but I watched a video yesterday with Saylor where he pitched it instead as a store of value. While the concept was not new to me, it was a really interesting video and he did a good job with it. BTC will not replace the dollar, but its probably going to eat gold.

My only issue with that is, it's behavior over the past 15 years seems to have a lot of interest rate risk built into. The thing about gold is historically it has been a store of value that is independent of interest rate risk, and I'm just not seeing much evidence that BTC is also orthogonal to interest rates. When rates went up, BTC went down. When interest rates were low, BTC also mostly climbed. If I want exposur…

But currently BTC is at an all time high while rates are the highest they've been since Bitcoin's inception?

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#54

Post by pcthrowaway »

dharma1 wrote: post #51
pcthrowaway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other side (people with fiat) are incentivized to preach that gospel as well, as the value of their tokens continues to decrease relative to crypto. Disclaimer: I actually dislike bitcoin (and other proof of work cryptos) very much, but the jury's still out on which side is more correct in their criticism of the other.

and the people without much of either token also have an opinion :) PoS ledgers seem like a better design, but they alone don't solve very uneven/concentrated token distributions that you end up with every monetary system

Yeah, crypto maxis (and especially bitcoin maxis) really do talk about it like it's the next coming of Jesus.

Crypto absolutely will not solve that specific problem of any monetary system. It may solve some others though, in addition to introducing many novel problems

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#55

Post by BLKNSLVR »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #32
IncreasePosts wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because of the insane costs of securing the network. If it used trivial resources people probably wouldn't care

Every time bitcoin goes up $1 N number of people will die from the networks CO2 output over the coming centuries. N may be five to seven digits.

Bitcoin has an incredibly small effect in that space if you insist on using that as an argument against.

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#56

Post by jpk »

paulpauper wrote: post #42
paulgb wrote: post #38

At today's price, MSTR owns about $14B of Bitcoin and has a market cap of almost $30B. Has anyone here actually used MicroStrategy, the product/service offering? Is the software company behind it worth the implied $16B, or is MSTR essentially just a Bitcoin ETF with a really bad fee ratio? (I’m not even counting the $2B debt on their books) Would I be dumb to do a long BTC / short MSTR pair trade?

Would I be dumb to do a long BTC / short MSTR pair trade? yes because one of the legs can have unbounded losses

I think you're taking the question too literally. One can surely make the bet that two securities will move in opposite directions, with bounded loss potential, using things like option spreads.

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#57

Post by olalonde »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #32
IncreasePosts wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because of the insane costs of securing the network. If it used trivial resources people probably wouldn't care

Every time bitcoin goes up $1 N number of people will die from the networks CO2 output over the coming centuries. N may be five to seven digits.

Bitcoin mining doesn't produce any more CO2 than your computer or mobile phone does.

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#58

Post by BLKNSLVR »

lupire wrote: post #40
jongjong wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual stuff. Political and corporate bribery and extortion. Bitcoin is great for that. Made all the better by the fact that many bribe recipients cannot access their Bitcoins in the current system due to government surveillance of exchanges. This creates an incentive for insiders to take down the current socio-economic system. Just as a short seller has an incentive to see the company crash. They will have no iss…

The market cap of Bitcoin is 99% not self custodial with keys people still have control of, not counting Satoshi'd hoard that might or might not be accessible. All the new ETF interest in Bitcoin is just digital beanie babies. Without the tradfi system, there would be almost no demand for Bitcoin, which completely undermines its alleged purpose. If you want crypto currency , Bitcoin isnt it.

It's not possible to start a new currency system without reference to, dependence upon, and transfers with, the existing currency system - especially given that the existing system is so entrenched due to its extensive history.

Given Bitcoin's reason for existence, it's obvious for another reason that "without the the tradfi system, there would be almost no demand for Bitcoin": if everyone trusted that tradfi was a good system and working fairly for all members of society then bitcoin wouldn't have a reason to exist.

Bitcoin, like Trump's popularity, is an FU to a system that's reaching or reached a critical mass of people lacking trust in it.

And that doesn't mean it's good or bad or better or worse, what it means is that people are looking for an alternative to the perceived hopelessness of their futures if they 'stay the course'.

Re: Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin

#59

Post by greyface- »

7e wrote: post #13
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

I had always thought of BTC in terms of an alternate currency but I watched a video yesterday with Saylor where he pitched it instead as a store of value. While the concept was not new to me, it was a really interesting video and he did a good job with it. BTC will not replace the dollar, but its probably going to eat gold.

What value does it provide?

Bitcoin can be used to pay transaction fees for permanent storage, timestamping, and distribution of arbitrary data - typically but not necessarily transaction data - without reliance on a trusted third party.

Maybe that's circular. Some people say the US dollar has value because it can be used to pay taxes.

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