HSBC bans customers from buying Bitcoin-backer MicroStrategy shares

I know memes are frowned upon on HN but I couldn't resist here: https://i.imgflip.com/55eaft.jpg

> “HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from VCs (virtual currencies),” HSBC said in a statement.

But you wouldn't be? This is a product literally called "InvestDirect" where private individuals are buying stocks and assuming all the risk.

If you don't want to offer margin on virtual currency products, more power to you, that is your risk. But if customers are buying with cash, it seems pretty suspect for the bank to claim that is increasing the bank's risk exposure.

Honestly it wouldn't be the worst idea to have a "Net Neutrality" for brokers.

>The bank said its policy towards cryptocurrencies had been in place since 2018 and is kept under review. It could not immediately say which countries the ban applied to.

My guess is that it's just some middle manager blindly following directives from 2018 that haven't been updated. I can't think of any other reason why they'd ban it when everyone else is moving in the opposite direction.

> Honestly it wouldn't be the worst idea to have a "Net Neutrality" for brokers.

and/or we could tokenize securities onto permissionless and decentralised ledgers and stop feeding the intermediaries

note that a ledger with transaction validation rules which enforce KYC can still be permissionless and decentralised

bitcoin isn't "permissioned" just because you need a valid signature to spend an output

Is there a good up-to-date resource for understanding the current premium that MSTR has over its BTC holdings? The article says: "MicroStrategy said last week it owns around 91,579 bitcoins. Its holdings, worth around $5.5 billion according to a Reuters calculation, are equal to around 80% of its $6.8 billion market capitalisation."

Naively, this would imply a fairly low premium. But among other things, this doesn't account for fact that Microstrategy took on a lot of debt to buy their bitcoins. Essentially, I'd like to see an updated and more complete analysis like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/microstrategy/comments/ltypps/sell_.... Does such a thing exist?