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Comment by howlgarnish | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: MicroStrategy's CEO (claims to) personally hold some $250M worth of Bitcoin.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/82566/microstrategy-ce...

It might not be terribly cynical to assume that having his own company purchase some of those holdings from himself would be a pretty nice way to turn the theoretical valuation (currently near an all time high) into cold hard cash before Tether hits the rotary ventilator.

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It's actually worth $343 million now (he paid $175M earlier this year)

Here is a table of all publicly available Bitcoin holdings as of December 12th: https://www.kevinrooke.com/bitcoin

That website has two different metrics: "current value" and "fair value".

Are they saying the market price of a coin isn't "fair"?

Hm I only see “current value” now.

It's mentioned in the different Holding History charts a little further down the page.

Those appear to be the value of their holdings as USD trade at that moment in time. Check the date on the far left.

So succinctly, the bear case for crypto is Tether gets shut down by USA (or international treaty) and then any hard cash left in crypto markets after that is slowly drained by miners paying electric bills? (Ignoring 51% attack and attack by hostile tax policy.)

The bear case is that markets realize Tether is backed only hot air and head for the exits. Tether "breaks the buck" (price goes under $1.00), and on USDT exchanges there's a spike in all other cryptos as people buy anything and everything to get rid of it. On exchanges with actual fiat, people get spooked and start selling crypto for fiat, spooking more people into selling and triggering a market crash.

This, incidentally, is pretty much what happened when Mt Gox disclosed that they were backed by hot air because they had most of their reserves stolen.

But everyone "in" on crypto wants Tether to hold, so it will, which is why that scam even works at all. A run on Tether is not going to happen, everyone already knows there's nothing there and yet it holds

That's what people say right before ponzis collapse.

Is it comparable to a Ponzi scheme? It doesn't seem like Bitcoin relies on a constant influx of cash, simply the belief that any given holder desiring to exchange for USD will get x amount for it.

>This, incidentally, is pretty much what happened when Mt Gox ...

Indeed.

Let's hope the same story won't repeat when Paypal is found to hold fractional reserves of their BTC-denominated liabilities.

Mt. Gox was handling 70% of Bitcoin trade volume at the time. Of course the price crashed, when everyone on Mt. Gox tried to sell their mostly-stolen Bitcoins while they could.

I don't know how a Tether crash would play out but it's an entirely different situation.

> the bear case for crypto is Tether gets shut down by USA (or international treaty)

I am pretty astonished this has not happened already.

Only way I can explain it is that Tether is helping the CIA launder money. Seriously. Nothing else explains it.

Yea.. seems like a massive conflict of interest.

"rotary ventilator"?

(fan)

That would be self-dealing and illegal.

If these were shares, yes, but AFAIK the laws haven't caught up to Bitcoin yet.

Caught up? The laws practically ignore spot commodities and all property outside of securities and derivatives of commodities. Congress knows what they are and leaves property regulation to the states (except where they didn't), who also knows what they are and ignores it.

The laws cover “financial transactions”, full stop.

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