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Comment by mlcrypto | Hacker News Reader

They can hold the BTC forever and pay the merchant with their massive cash reserve or 0% interest debt. Profit

The potential downside on this is 100%. The potential upside on this is... Unknowable.

They would never get away with this as a publicly traded company.

Why would they not? This is effectively buying Bitcoin, slowly, at a discount (they'll surely slap hefty fees/unfavorable exchange rates on it, because there are many people who will happily pay extra for the privilege of paying with crypto, just like people will pay a lot more for anything slapped with an "organic" label).

Tesla, a publicly traded company, got away with buying $1.5 billion in Bitcoin just fine.

PayPal can also sell that Bitcoin to customers who want to buy Bitcoin.

Tesla is not a payment processor. Nor is it in the business of profiting off of crypto as a fundamental change in it's business model.

I'm replying to a comment saying they should use their cash reserve to buy bitcoin instead of dividends/buybacks.

And yes, they can sell it and have some level of "float" to support crypto buy/sell exchange. But the comment was a hodl comment to "make them more money."

See Microstrategy... speculative attack on fiat.

They could also accept pebbles and sand as payment, hold them forever, and pay the merchant with their massive cash reserve or 0% interest debt. Profit.

Pebbles and sand might be safer to hold if they are less volatile than BTC. A company like Paypal needs stability, not a directional bet on an asset.

USD is very stable in it's decline. Good luck

The USD is suffering from a savings glut. The domestic financial markets are already fully developed. Any additional savings from foreign nations is not helping the USA and merely forces an exorbitant downside. Investments have to match savings. All the potentially productive investments have already been made for the current level of inflation. There is nowhere for the money to go so you have two options: Unproductive investments, reduce the savings rate.

Unproductive investments are basically the constant increase in stock and housing prices over the last decade. You're not buying those to make more money, there simply is no other place for the money to go. The only way the savings rate can be reduced domestically is through unemployment or underemployment. Unemployed people don't earn money but they still have to spend, which reduces savings.

It's a truly hopeless situation for the humans living the USA. But hey, at least the dollar is still "good".

Oh right, presidents are taking on debt to cancel the savings glut that was forced upon them. That's a bad thing.

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