"One of the current market mysteries is why people are paying approximately $2 for $1 of bitcoin."
Correct question.
Getting a little bit ridiculous now (#991218, #984224, #1003228) that the only thing mainstream media is talking about is the wacky financial-engineering going on in bitcoinland. Fair enough, it's the only thing I'm thinking about too, so whatevs. WHYYYY?!
Here are some reason takes I've collected:
- Jesse Myers, 22 May: “Strategy as a capital pump to accelerate the flow of capital from bonds to bitcoin.”
- Richard Byworth: don't understand... "If you want to take over the system, you have to slowly get into the system and start to permeate it..." Bitcoin Matrix podcast June 2, 2025.
- “we are living through a once-in-a-lifetime integration of Bitcoin into financial markets.” Steven Lubka
- Jeff Walton “$MSTR is a perpetual equity with a tax-advantaged Bitcoin dividend reinvestment program”
Bryce Elder at FT is joining the critique chorus:
After MicroStrategy discovered it could buy bitcoin in a recursive loop using money raised by selling shares and weird convertible debt at a premium to its net asset value, lots of companies have been doing the same thing.
Kind of the world's least surprising thing: Someone finds a perpetual motion machine, others. will. copy. it.
Yeah, this isn't reasonable: "The Smarter Web Company now has a market cap of £377.7mn. It’s the biggest stock by value on Aquis, having gained 7,300 per cent in six weeks. If moved to the main market it would be on the fringes of the FTSE 250 index alongside Halfords, Asos and YouGov."
The biggest shareholder, with 19.1 per cent, is a bitcoin hedge fund called 210k Capital. The fund manager, UTXO Management, is one of many bitcoin-related enterprises run by Tyler Evans. As well as publishing Bitcoin Magazine and organising The Bitcoin Conference, Evans is part of the team that’s converting Nasdaq-listed healthcare group KindlyMD into a bitcoin treasury company to be renamed Nakamoto.
uh-huuuu:
Having already raised money four times since IPO, the Smarter Web Company announced today it holds 242.34 bitcoins. Its crypto pot has a spot-price value of £18.8mn.
Buyers of this stock are paying more than £20 for £1 of bitcoin.
We should all know how this ends. We just don’t know when.
Perpetual BTC yield, storage, unleashing trapped capital yada-yada, but valuing balance sheet bitcoin at $2.1m per coin seems, uh, not right!
Archived, but it's Alphaville so probs open
https://archive.md/kXiQM