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

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/03/13/michael-saylors-microstrategy-raising-another-500m-to-buy-more-bitcoin/

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

41 72 2 years ago

coindesk.com

paulpauper6• 2 years ago

this sounds like a ponzi scheme in the making, or at least not going to end well

arno1• 2 years ago

#studybitcoin

paulpauper6• 2 years ago

using tons of debt to buy bitcoin is independent of the case for bitcoin

rwaksmunski• 2 years ago

That's one way of removing the excess cash out of the economy.

jongjong2• 2 years ago

The fiat scheme is the bigger ponzi. It's already the case that to earn any decent income in the fiat ponzi, one must have special social connections to business leaders and/or politicians. It's just like under communism.

I don't even like Bitcoin and don't own Bitcoin because I have ethical concerns about it. Bitcoin promotes corruption of the socio-political system via extreme, massive-scale tribalism. That said, it's probably the lesser of two evils.

As an outsider, it's ironic to witness fiat proponents neglect the power of corruption which they themselves have been benefitting from to a far greater extent than Bitcoiners.

The side which can exert the most corruption (the will of their tribe), most quietly, will win. Likely Bitcoin since it has the support of the masses and business leaders. Fiat proponents can only blame themselves. They're the ones who made Bitcoin possible with their global ponzi.

I don't like the current system and I also don't particularly like where it's going but the trajectory is clear.

alchemist1e92• 2 years ago

Bitcoin promotes corruption of the socio-political system via extreme, massive-scale tribalism.

Could you elaborate on what you mean and the mechanism for this?

kinghajj• 2 years ago

There's some hay in the cryptocurrency space right now about how MSTR's market cap merits its inclusion in the S&P 500, which some think will cause a "flywheel".

(1) Index funds purchase MSTR shares, driving up the price; (2) thus allowing Saylor to issue more debt to buy BTC, which drives that up; (3) MSTR shares appreciate due to its BTC holdings; (4) go to step 1 as funds need to rebalance and add more MSTR shares.

The weak points to this idea are definitely step 2 and even 3. MSTR won't be able to keep finding entities to buy its debt indefinitely, and MSTR is already trading well above what its BTC holdings' appreciation would justify, so there's some obviously unsustainable mania going on.

dharma13• 2 years ago

Inclusion to S&P500 is a committee decision, not based on purely market cap. It may not happen for MSTR.

MSTR is essentially a leveraged, debt laden commodity trust rn, with a highly volatile commodity making up most of its balance sheet.

Their premium to NAV is indeed very high, and makes you think why would anyone buy that vs a BTC ETF. Perhaps if you think BTC goes a lot higher (and stays there) their ongoing leverage and the premium you pay for it now makes sense? Their debt is pretty well structured - v. low interest and matures a long time from now, but remains to be seen how long he can keep issuing it.

He also keeps saying he's never going to sell BTC, but I don't see how he's going to service his debt eventually if he doesn't sell. Unless he starts market making with the treasury or somehow putting it to work

alchemist1e92• 2 years ago

why is Bitcoin so divisive? why some people just “get it” and other scream until they are blue in their face it’s a scam?

it’s such a curious litmus test for something but I’m not sure exactly what.

throwaway98797• 2 years ago

all faith based stuff is like that

religion

politics

they work because people believe they work

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

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

ska• 2 years ago

I suspect what you are missing here is that both sides just "get it", they disagree what "it" is. I don't find the anti-crypto folks to be particularly more or less screamy than the pro-crypto folks, for what it's worth.

dharma13• 2 years ago

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

lupire3• 2 years ago

The only use case is getting rich of of other people's losses. There's no social value creation. Some people love that and some hate that.

paulpauper6• 2 years ago

there is nothing divisive about pointing out the inherent risk of using debt to buy a highly volaille asset on leverage

rand846633• 2 years ago

Possibly the worst website I remember trying to read on mobile. Finding, reading and not loosing the actual text was a real challenge.. too bad, would have liked to know the content.

BLKNSLVR4• 2 years ago

Cryptocurrency "news" websites are a new breed of awful combination of advertising monetisation and poor auto-generated AI interpretation trash (with awful grammar) shoved into whatever white-space is left over.

(I think) Coindesk is one of the better ones...

lend000• 2 years ago

I always thought Saylor's liquidation would be the perfect reversal signal during the last bear market, but alas, it was FTX, and Saylor survived.

Of course, it's plausible that he'll take out some massive loans to buy Bitcoin at the top of this current bull cycle and get himself into trouble regardless. Perma-bears and perma-bulls are equally clueless in my book. It's just an admission you have no clue how markets work.

wonderwonder5• 2 years ago

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.

7e• 2 years ago

What value does it provide?

wonderwonder5• 2 years ago

None. Its a scarce resource that has been mutually agreed upon to be desirable. Much like gold or diamonds. Sure they have some limited use in non jewelry applications but nothing that justifies their prices vs the existing supply besides people just agreeing they are valuable.

As a store of value though vs gold it has more positives. Much easier to transport a billion dollars worth of btc than gold.

Much easier to self custody.

Truly limited supply, they pull more gold out of the ground every day.

The world literally just got together and decided BTC is what they want and the price reflects that. Its a fascinating case study just in that regard.

The video is here: Page is terrible, video is about 1/3 down

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/buying-bitcoin-buying-nyc-ap...

sugarkjube• 2 years ago

Actually, there is an underlying value.

What is the the underlying value if a dollar? Or euro?

On first sight, there is none. But when the IRS knocks at your door to collect taxes, you will need to cough up dollars. Or euros when you live in europe. Rubel, yen or gold won't do.

That provides the underlying value of the dollar. Or the euro.

Now what about BTC ?

When the ransomware hacker knocks at your door, you'll have to get bitcoin. Dollars or rubel won't do. That provides the underlying value of the bitcoin.

greyface-• 2 years ago

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.

latchkey5• 2 years ago

Collateral for borrowing funds.

mandevil• 2 years ago

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 exposure to the interest rate + some extra exposure to other things I can just invest in equities.

wonderwonder5• 2 years ago

Completely valid as well. Makes a lot of sense to diversify, no need to be all in.

With that said; there are few other assets that have accumulated this much value over their initial existence. BTC market cap just passed silver. Gold is a 10x away. So yes it absolutely has volatility but the greater trend is exclusively up with little sign of stopping.

Tubeee• 2 years ago

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

sailfast• 2 years ago

Only if bagholders convince others that this is true. It's a sales and stability pitch at this point just like fiat currency.

Not sure why it's a good long-term store. It requires electricity to exist.

hakfoo• 2 years ago

By that comparison, I wouldn't count gold out.

Its physical durability is established. You'll have no problems dealing with a 150-year-old coin, but I could see even things like "paper key/secret" storage falling apart if the appropriate ecosystem isn't there to restore access.

Its volatility is far less than BTC. The dollar still does better by that metric in non-dramatic times, but there's the implicit "if you're looking for alternative value stores, you've probably already turned up your nose to the dollar."

Offline cash in and out is still easier. Most communities have a coin dealer who will happily exchange dollars for sovereigns, or back. Yes, the spread is probably large, but I'd trust a cash-in-hand transaction with a local dealer a lot more than an exchange who will suddenly go into "we no longer offer fiat withdrawls, have some HappyFunCoin instead mode.

bcrl• 2 years ago

Proof of work needs to be outlawed. Externalities will be the death of us.

BLKNSLVR4• 2 years ago

Fossil fuels first, and then we'll see what might need to be next, if anything.

npoc• 2 years ago

If money isn't proof of work, then that infers some people don't have to work for it.

mise_en_place• 2 years ago

This is a very risky move, considering how leveraged the company already is.

paulpauper6• 2 years ago

yeah. i would rather raise $ to deploy if BTC falls a lot to buy the dip . buying at 70k seems so foolish

latchkey5• 2 years ago

Buying at $10k was foolish, yet here we are. The point being that people will say that at any price point, even though the price always goes beyond all time highs during every bull market.

paulgb• 2 years ago

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?

paulpauper6• 2 years ago

Would I be dumb to do a long BTC / short MSTR pair trade?

yes because one of the legs can have unbounded losses

jpk• 2 years ago

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.

arcticbull• 2 years ago

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...

xiphias2• 2 years ago

Accoding to the CEO (Michael Saylor) most of the price premium comes from institutions like pension funds not being allowed to directly hold BTC, but they are allowed to a ratio of the money in stocks. At the same time they need exposure to BTC as an independent asset that performs well (funds have performance mandates).

Of course now that spot ETF is approved it changes the picture somewhat, but it looks like MSTR is still needed as an institutional vehicle for wrapping BTC.

joegibbs2• 2 years ago

I might be wrong, it can always keep going up, but is it wise to make a big purchase of an asset that has just reached an all-time high? Especially given how volatile BTC is - it could possibly go to 200k or higher, or it could possibly lose 70% in a year like it did in 2022.

b0sk• 2 years ago

You should see the tweets of these guys. Not only they expect it to always go up, they think this is still in early stages and the price of 1 BTC could go to millions of USD.

joegibbs2• 2 years ago

Unless there is massive inflation how would that even be possible? At $1 million it becomes close to the value of all gold combined, the GDP of the United States or the market cap of the entire Nasdaq. At that point, where does the money come from to buy more?

ur-whale• 2 years ago

Why would anyone invest in this 500M USD raise instead of actually buying BTC directly ?

Especially now that ETFs give access to Bitcoin to institutions that traditionally could not touch it.

Makes no sense to me.

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

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