The Rise and Future Fall of MicroStrategy
medium.com
medium.com
That is not the case. MSTR has a simple business: "Give us money, we invest it into Bitcoin for you and shield you from the downside. In return, we get some of the upside."
As long as the Bitcoin price goes up, that is a viable business. How much it is worth depends on how many customers they will find in the future. It does NOT depend on their NAV. The premium to NAV simply reflects the market's valuation of their future business potential.
How does Microstrategy shield anyone from downside?
Since they had a sizeable amount of Bitcoin before they started this approach, in theory they might be able to repay all the lenders in full even if the Bitcoin price only declines from now on. Depending on the details of their behavior and the price movement. If Bitcoin's price declines rapidly and they fail to sell quickly enough, then they would go broke.
It is a better trade if the premium continues to rally. Otherwise it’s a worse trade.
Premium goes to techies and lawyers and stuff.
Boomer does not know about bitcoin wallets.
Engineer at MicroStrategy does.
Banks can do fractional reserve banking to 'pay' for the expense of storing our money. Can crypto wallets do such a thing? Or would they have to borrow money?
You open an acccount, you do a kyc, you declare it to the state, and they are submitted to regulations in your country.
Coinbase is an expensive one, but way cheaper than micro strategy, and is from y combinator s12 so you know what to expect.
Deal with an exhange directly, it's cheaper, and more flexible. No wallet to manage, and you can handle a few millions before even having to talk to a human.
Of course you lose a lot of advantages of crypto, but you were going to with micro strategy anyway.
Or buy an etf if you really like your bank.
Although I would argue now is the worse time to buy. You had to buy last year, or wait until 2 years, assuming the halving cycle is still relevant, which I believe it is.
It is expected from most crypto holders that we are not that far from the top and the usual crash back is near.
Some my friends are still in, but have placed their exit orders already. I'm already out with a 500% profit and play it safe.
You may be able to get some more, but it's getting riskier by the day.
And maybe the cycle will break, but it's really not what I would bet on.
It essentially allows you to buy bitcoin at 3x the market price. (mstr market cap is about 3x the bitcoin it holds)
People seem to equate that as meaning that the future stock price will grow at a faster rate than the price of bitcoin, but that would require the premium to grow to an even larger factor than the current 3x. It also ignores the reality that a falling bitcoin price should completely wipe out the premium of stock price over net asset value (if we are to apply any common sense).
Of course I might be missing some great insight that makes it something other than a really stupid gamble.
Buy bitcoin. Buy a bitcoin etf. But don’t buy a wrapper on bitcoin at a premium to the underlying bitcoin. Eventually this collapses on itself.
It wasn't an easy ride, but long term it was the right choice for me. It isn't that much much money because I stopped contributing to it about 15 years ago (instead opting to do what you said, buy BTC directly), but my 401k has never seen that sort of growth.
With the fairly recent split, I can now sell covered call options. I generally sell OTM and then use the proceed from that to buy more MSTR. My goal is to compound the stock, not dollars. It will split again, enabling me to compound again.
Once you spend the time understanding what he is doing, you will understand the value in investing in both. It definitely takes an acceptance that Bitcoin won't go to zero, but if you can get past that, as he has done, then the risk profile changes dramatically.
> As long as the Bitcoin price goes up, that is a viable business.
He's been doing this for 4 years. The price has had some wild swings in that timeframe. He's sold one time (for tax loss harvesting) and bought right back in. Everything is tracked in public, because it is a public security. https://saylortracker.com/
He's never sold because he had to. In that timeframe, bitcoin has also always gone up. It is higher than it was 4 years ago. He has stated in public that he won't ever sell, nor will he have to.
So, what part of this is a ponzi scheme?
Again, what makes this a ponzi?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/microstrategy-mstr-b...
Okay, let's assume Bitcoin's price is going up forever, Laura. Right now, 16 years after Bitcoin was invented, that's a completely reasonable assumption.
> How much it is worth depends on how many customers they will find in the future. It does NOT depend on their NAV. The premium to NAV simply reflects the market's valuation of their future business potential.
Hold it! You're saying that the premium is saying that rational buyers are calculating that there'll be more customers for $MSTR or Microstrategy's convertible bonds in the future? So it's a ponzi? But is it a good ponzi or a bad ponzi?
That is: where is value being created to be returned to investors who are ultimately left holding the bag?
One is retail YOLOing into it like a meme coin.
The other is professional investors who want bitcoin exposure but are bound by investment mandates to equities only.
Neither of these are particularly good reasons long term, nor will they endure a pullback in bitcoin price.
I feel like that’s just what the market has been like since 2020
The S&P 500 peaked at 5400 in December 2021 and dropped to 3800 in September 2022, and went mostly sideways to 4300 until October 2023, after which is has mostly gone up:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_stock_market_decline
* https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...
People seem to (a) forgotten that it happened:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias
and (b) forgotten that it was not a forgone conclusion that there'd be a recovery/growth:
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...
Never noticed that attitude before 2020
MSTR was recently added to QQQ. With the rebalance, they have no choice now.
Obviously, it went up in value and down in value and it doesn’t make much sense over the long term. Currently, governments are tolerating the loophole of it being used to launder money, purchase illicit goods and evade financial border controls.
As long as that is tolerated, it will be successful and when governments start to crack down it won’t be successful, because it sucks as a currency but seems to make a pretty good tulip bulb.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but as someone who’s purchased a few things with bitcoin, it has insane transaction fees, is not easy to use and is not a stable store of value, so why people would flock to it as money other than the above reasons is beyond me.
Despite what the whitepaper laid out, it has morphed into something that isn't money. Use the analogy that Saylor lays out... https://x.com/saylor/status/1860399115449799119
Lots of water yet to go under the bridge though.
If the underlying asset doubles, MicroStrategy roughly doubles. But if the underlying asset goes down by 50%, MicroStrategy is stuck paying interest on loans it took to buy an asset that’s now heavily underwater. It can suffer much worse than 50% in that scenario.
Not to pretend that other leveraged funds founder's are equally known as saylor, but how do all other funds differentiate themselves? Is it the same to through money at one vs another?
Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square is listed in London and trades at a substantial discount to net asset value (something like 30%). Maybe that’s an indication that markets find it hard to value these vehicles.
"seems"!
Yes, there are lots of degenerate gamblers, grifters, and scammers in the crypto scene, but any new platform that's in any way related to finance will attract that scum.
If you spend a little while attempting to understand Bitcoin's reason for existence, it may start to make some sense.
You don't have to buy in, but you will be able to provide a more educated contribution to the discussion.
Bitcoins are the most useless "asset" that there has ever been. At least beanie babies had some entertainment value and tulips look pretty.
Bitcoins and all the other nonsense contribute nothing to the world's real economy, it's entirely a mechanism for washing or moving fiat currency from one place to another.
It is used extensively in Asia entirely for that purpose, paying for drugs and gambling transfers.
For the actual economy it is useless and the entire "market" is just barely regulated gambling and entertainment.
I don't know if bitcoin will eventually become a low level store of value, or if the red hats now running US government will use it to reduce the nation's indebtedness, or if it will gradually fade away as people lose interest, or if it will crash and burn over a weekend.
But I am quite certain that the current system of government currencies, sanctions, repression and surveillance is unsustainable in the long run. One look at the stupendously large debt that can never be repaid should make it obvious that the current state cannot continue forever.
Nobody knows how long the long run is, but the fiat system has been flashing signals of stress and potential fracture for at least twenty years. Maybe governments and central banks can keep papering over its fault lines for another decade. But when a thing cannot continue forever, at some point it will stop.
Is bitcoin the replacement for the base layer? Or is it at least a way to preserve some wealth, outside the increasingly rickety nation-state-fiat system? Some mainstream finance leaders who manage trillions and are far smarter and better connected that I am, seem to think so.
I don't know, and you don't know, but there's more than enough evidence that there's something real here. It can't be easily dismissed as just beanie babies, tulips and drug dealers.
Also mining will come to an end soon as it becomes impossible to meet the energy demand.
That's precisely one of it's key differentiators from fiat.
If you're meaning "when all states fail", well, everything falls off the table, and "told you so"-ing about Bitcoin might be just a little bit petty.
And getting anything useful from them does depend on states not regulating them into obsolescence or black markets, with all the baggage those markets entail.
As for pettiness, I'm not the one promoting dubious benefits, nor am I invested in any coins or their downfall. Just concerned the whole thing is making the world worse: more gambling, more corruption, more scams, more wasted energy, more pollution, etc.
Hilariously, some people won't realize that your comment is almost entirely copy-pasta from a decade ago when Bitcoin cost less than $500. Thanks for the laughs though. Good memories.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/russia-is-using-b...
Your definition of "useless" must be different from mine.
Oh gosh. You're actually one of those people. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you!
And since you feel Bitcoin is useless (I'm leaving the door wide open for a retort filled with cognitive dissonance), please send me 21BTC for which I'll pay you $1000 immediately? My address is:
bc1q6k9fcpk9z9wrt9fhmu2dnkq7cn0w72rkpwwvmmBla bla bla. What I do with things in private is not really your business, actually.
Please send me a useless Bitcoin today and I'll pay you useful money for your effort as described above.
Let's trade, sir.
It's a myth that markets are irrational. It's a joke repeated amongst traders but fundamentally, we all know that markets simply aggregate all available information and reflect it in a price. A free market as a whole has rationality as its equilibrium: it's always telling you something true about the world.
To call the market irrational is a more humble claim than intended by those who quote it to aver that only they are rational, that is, it says: "I can't figure out what the market knows that I don't."
It means, "Those who couldn't hear the music assumed that those who were dancing were insane."
2) The supply of gold is less predictable. For instance, just last month, China announced the discovery of the world's largest known gold deposit, estimated to be worth over $80 billion.
You can? I think it's too computationally expensive. We do less than 1 hash per day. And thats with paper as an aid
As some phishing victims have learned to their peril. Of course BTC transfers are non-reversible / non-refundable, with no means of redress (unlike a bank transfer).
Gold is 'first place' and has been a symbol of value for most of our recorded history.
Edit: I hit the limit for now so here's a reply:
>Was it supposed to be [private]? A currency with a complete ledger of transactions available for view by anyone in the p2p network is hardly secure by design
It was intended to be secure and private. That is, people can't steal your Bitcoin (theoretically) and the public ledger gives you some potential strategy if you did want to establish a reputation while dealing with anonymous people. Someone could also deal with you without ever knowing your identity, which makes it private. It would be fairly hard to identify Bitcoin users if their wallets were never linked to their identities, e.g. through an exchange. I don't know how other cryptocurrencies do their ledgers but I assume you are limited to querying the network about specific transactions instead of having access to it all. It could be done by having public yet encrypted transaction records as well maybe. Idk, cryptocurrency never appealed to me. I remember thinking my classmates were insane for buying Bitcoin at $70. The price movement we've seen feels like some insiders using it to embezzle money from reputable institutions who have been sold on the hype. We're in real trouble if the government starts buying it. We will be robbed blind.
Edit: thanks for the reply. In that sense that you are able to be only identified by a wallet address, that makes sense. I guess I meant that, unlike privacy-focused coins like Monero, there is a way to see who sent what to who (even if who is just an address) and to develop surveillance based on this.
Actually it has not. Not in Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztec, Mayans). Also not for the Chinese, who used silver for currency (and gold for ceremonial purposes). Around the Mediterranean, gold became a currency 'only' around 500BC with the Lydians—which is a very long time after the first economic records we have, which take back to Ur III, the Babylonians (Hammurabi), Ancient Egypt.
And when it was used, there were periods of economic stagnation due to its fixed supply:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
Letters of credit / bills of exchange were used in the Middle Ages. Most regular folks worked on credit for their day to day lives:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
The gold standard only appeared in the 1800s:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold
And it had all sorts of problems with it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
I think your references to China probably backs me up: it was used in ceremony for a reason.
Using gold as a currency has many problems: chief among them is scarcity as you mentioned.
Yet we want to pretend it will be different with Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is scarce, gold is not. For example, El Salvador just found trillions worth.
It would take a majority of the miners to vote (by running a fork of the software) to increase supply, which goes against their own economics.
Which is a bug:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
“Bitcoin is not affected by this because it is fundamentally different from popular currency.”
The other arguments given are unproven and doubtful.
See the links in the post about the problems with deflationary currencies. See also the links of events that were made worse by finite/deflationary currencies; reposting:
> the problems with deflationary currencies
That's where you are mistaken, Bitcoin isn't a currency.
How is it a bug?
It's difficult to use Bitcoin as currency because its value keeps rising. And when there are no more coins to be mined, when the value stops increasing: do you think everyone will suddenly agree to begin using it as currency?
Or do you think everyone will try and sell Bitcoin to cash out for real currency? What happens to Bitcoin value at that point?
While depletion of mining rewards is very far into the future, it will very soon be virtually nothing, the only reward will be trading fees, and I'm not bullish on that.
Satoshi should have just made a linear minting algo. All early reward was a mistake. We'll see why inflation is necessary. In 80 years will the youngins want a coin that they have no way of minting except begging their grampas for it?
When the youngins want money, they don't beg Jerome Powell to print them USD, or Satoshi to linearly mint them BTC--they get a job and work for it.
Fiat currency fails when a nation defaults on its loans because people lose faith in the currency.
The money printing scares everyone because of the US's rising debt. If it cannot be balanced at some point, people will think inflation is permanent.
It's difficult to cut costs because the US economy must pay to maintain its status. The only way to reduce our debt is to increase our GDP: aka, sell more shit and do more with less.
Taxes and printed money are used as a redistributive system.
Newborns enjoy unemployment benefits, basic health care, schooling etc...
Bitcoin does not have this property, it's basically its whole ethos.
But the ability of the government to print usd to pay for social benefits is 100% a property of the coin.
The argument is simple, Bitcoin has a limited supply and usd has constant minting, therefore btc gives more power to old farts, and usd gives power to everyone (citizens of the us)
Don't overthink the simple.
If the government were so benevolent as to print money to pay for kids' education, the country would be far better off. Teachers would not be making paltry wages and paying for classroom supplies out of pocket. And bitcoin would not exist. Bitcoin was created by someone who didn't approve of what the old farts did with the money they print, and wanted to give power back to everyone (citizens of the world).
Don't overthink the simple.
Let me cut your hypothetical right there to simplify and ignore the rest. It does, government prints money to pay, among other things for education.
Even in ordinary money creation, yes the government borrows money, but it borrows it to fund state expenses like schools. They are paying interest which they just printed to fund these operations.
Then exceptionally, (if they are ever insolvent or need money), they directly create money. 2008 crisis, 2021 covid crisis, wars.
I don't understand how you simultaneously believe that the government prints money, but doesn't fund government expenses with printed money. Do they just print money to devalue savings and spite you?
> A central bank enacts quantitative easing by purchasing, regardless of interest rates, a predetermined quantity of bonds or other financial assets on financial markets from private financial institutions.[12][13] This action increases the excess reserves that banks hold. The goal of this policy is to ease financial conditions, increase market liquidity, and encourage private bank lending.
--
> I don't understand how you simultaneously believe that the government prints money, but doesn't fund government expenses with printed money. Do they just print money to devalue savings and spite you?
"The government" is not a monolithic entity. Money printing is monetary policy. Taxes and social services are fiscal policy. I think you are mixing those two things up.
The arm of the government that prints money is not doing it to spite the citizens (Hanlon's razor). They're doing to maximize employment, stabilize prices, and moderate long-term interest rates[1]. Funding schools is not part of those goals. That happens elsewhere in government, far away from the money printers.
That's because that is what it is. Just like gold. (Which, besides mostly jewelry, has few other 'practical' application—modest use in industry and medicine.)
> It's difficult to use Bitcoin as currency because its value keeps rising.
And this is the problem with deflationary currencies, and was predicted a decade ago:
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
> And when there are no more coins to be mined, when the value stops increasing: do you think everyone will suddenly agree to begin using it as currency?
When there are no more coins to be mined (even if you want to get into slicing BTCs into satoshis) the value will increase: even more: if the demand for it goes up by (e.g.) 2% every year but your supply goes up 0%, what does Econ 101 tell us will happen? Even now folks are mostly hoarding:
* https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/11/23/bitcoin-supply-i...
If everyone thought of Bitcoin the way I do: its price would plummet.
Fiat currency works because it's linked to a county's GDP, its credit (in the eyes of other nations). With such a system, you can put a price on commodity, like gold or Bitcoin.
World trade is mostly done with the US dollar. Others are willing to trade the dollar because of belief in its issuing country's GDP and future economy. I understand that lack of faith in the US dollar and its 'money printer' are part of Bitcoin's rise... But that's a different topic in my opinion.
Anyhow, gold is created in the heart of exploding stars, it looks good (we all love pretty, shiny things), it's rare. It's used in most advanced electronics (it's critical for sure, not sure about practical). Gold has always existed, and there's no doubt it will exist in the future.
Bitcoin is math and ordered electrical charges. It's not being used the way it was intended. Its future is uncertain (quantum computing), and seems to be a big ponzi scheme. How are we expecting the value to keep increasing?
What "failing paper currencies" are you referring to? USD? EUR? GBP? JPY? AUD? CAD? CNY? MXN? Other?
Also, 'printing money' is a feature, not a bug: it allows for currency needs to be met so that economic activity/growth can occur. Otherwise you get into troubling situations:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...
We all know the Central Bank hymn book by now.
That said, printing money doesn't create economic activity nor economic growth nor wealth. I know central bankers and their inflationist acolytes want you to believe this and they have dazzling models to show this, and convincing buttoned-up tales to prove this, and I'm not trying to re-litigate an argument as old as Vienna.
Hopefully some subset of humans will remember how wealth is created. And incidentally, if you look in your library, you can find very different interpretations of the various booms and economic depressions of history.
Yes, but some folks don't seem to accept the evidence and the historical record of what didn't work, and why we moved towards the current system. Some folks still think that FDR (and Keynes) got things wrong.
> That said, printing money doesn't create economic activity nor economic growth nor wealth.
While liquidity is not (necessarily) sufficient for economic activity it is necessary, and a lack of liquidity certainly hinders it. This is evidenced not least from the Great Depression and that once a country abandoned the gold standard they started to recover:
* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...
Fixed supply monetary systems (like the gold standard) are a hindrance, and it's not like they do anything useful like create a stable monetary base either:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
They did get things wrong. But that's my opinion. And economics isn't a science but a confidence game, mostly.
They were wrong because the market is a coordination mechanism that works based on information. The most important information in the market is the price signal. The first important price is the price of money. Central planners mess with that price and thus distort the market. In fact, the era of money printing has created more economic instability than prior periods.
But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers. If they couldn't do that it wouldn't be worth the effort to centrally manage and control all human economic activity.
But again, I'm not trying to re-litigate a boring debate. The Central Bankers won, monetary and fiscal control has been centralized in the hands of a few people. Gold has been confiscated and expropriated from civilian hands, the dollar is backed by nothing except guns and oil, and 90% of the world's trade and debt is dollarized.
Money printer go burrr and thanks to that printing all my assets over the past 20 years have become insanely valuable as denominated in dollars, which keep being printed.
> the historical record of what didn't work?
Work, for whom? By what measure? At what cost? And who paid the costs? You talk about the Great Depression but unless you're a time traveller you'll remember the GFC as well?
Ah. But this is all so boring and not worth debating because it's been debated for as long as humans have wanted central planning of economies and markets.
Thanks for all your referenced articles but I did not read your citations because I've read all this stuff before endlessly over many years, decades actually, because central bankers keep promoting their interpretation of history to justify their control of markets.
> They did get things wrong. But that's my opinion. And economics isn't a science but a confidence game, mostly.
I'm curious to know in what way you think FDR/Keynes got it wrong.
Hoover and others tried things in the (then) orthodox way in the early 1930s and things didn't recover. Further, as the Delong link shows, as soon as other countries followed the US' lead they too started to recover.
Then, when the US went back to then-orthodoxy in ~1936 under political pressure and moved towards (e.g.) a balanced budget, the economy started tanking right away. Further, the orthodoxy of (so-called) "sound money" and balanced budgets caused political turmoil in more than one country:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
A whole bunch of folks had to relearn this not too long ago when there was a push for "expansionary austerity", which Keynesians said would be bad for economic growth/recovery post-GFC, and which did in fact turn out to be bad:
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/...
> But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers.
Actually it's to regulate/moderate economic activity. Because it is not Friedman's money supply (quantity) that determines price stability (i.e., the rate of inflation), but rather its velocity. Even Milton Friedman admitted (Financial Times, 7 June 2003) that "The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did."
* https://myweb.liu.edu/~uroy/eco54/histlist/Friedman_M/moneta...
Even in the right-leaning Reagan/Thatcher 1980s central banks (e.g., Fed under Volker) gave up on money supply control and went to interest rates. This was formalized staring in the 1990s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting
> Gold has been confiscated and expropriated from civilian hands
What?
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costcos-gold-bars-are-selling-o...
* https://www.usgoldbureau.com/category/gold/gold-bars
* https://www.usmint.gov/coins/precious-metal-coins/gold/
> […] and 90% of the world's trade and debt is dollarized.
And before that most of the world's trade was (British) 'poundicized', because the UK had the largest economy in the world. And before that…. It seems to be fairly common that world trade tends to be done in the currency of the country that does the largest portion of world's trade—and if two countries are close both of their currencies tend to be used:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34928281-how-global-curr...
> Work, for whom? By what measure? At what cost? And who paid the costs? You talk about the Great Depression but unless you're a time traveller you'll remember the GFC as well?
Yes, I remember the GFC.
I remember then-monetarists abandoning Friedman's (and Greenspan's) ideas and (re-)embracing those of Keynes. I remember rending of garments by right-leaning folks when QE was announced about the terrible things would happen:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke
I remember Keynesian saying it would be fine… and being right.
It was fortunate that Bernanke was the Fed chairman at the time, as his area of academic research was things like the Great Depression (of the 1930s) and how tight monetary policy (dictated by the gold standard) made things worse:
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...
No, you shouldn't be. I'm just a random guy on the internet.
>> But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers.
> Actually it's to regulate/moderate economic activity.
You see how you miss the point while restating my point? It's as though you're trolling me. We've literally said the same thing.
Ah well, I definitely can't read your long post, as well intentioned as it is because it's too long and I've already spent far too many years debating this stuff.
But thanks again. Maybe someone else will indulge you. I just happen to lack the energy and inclination.
It's simply a matter of first principles and values: If you believe in central planning and control of human activity, then you'll choose your adventure that way. If on the other hand, you don't want a cabal choosing winners and losers, and you truly believe in free markets, for money and everything else, then you'll choose a different path.
You and I can pontificate all day about our chosen interpretations of history, but to what end? You've already made up your mind. I used to believe what you do and buried interlocutors under endless citations extolling central banking.
What does debate with strangers accomplish? Nothing really.
Anyway, merry Christmas and happy new year.
> What?
Smh. For someone whose most vivid recollection seems to be of The Great Depression, you somehow don't remember Executive Order 6102.
Any other description is an act of mental gymnastics.
The premium is irrelevant to me because my goal is to own more MSTR stock. The more stock I own, the more covered call options I can sell. Once everyone starts compounding the stock, the price goes up, they have more money to buy and hold more bitcoin, the price of bitcoin goes up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem
What he has created is a circular infinite money machine that can only be likened to what Warren Buffet did with buying insurance companies and their infinite float.
The current financial system is straight up unusable. Cashing out on the future of money is cool.