OK, this was legit funny.
Mr. Elder (#1007029) is carving out an entertaining anti-bitcoin niche.
I love it when people write snarky, sarcastic things dressed up as something else.
"I have a pound coin and I’m going to launch a pound coin treasury company."
It’s reasonable to believe that a pound coin in my possession can be valued at more than £1. Coins have advantages over other forms of money (permissionless means of exchange; store of value with low custody costs; necessary for hiring a shopping trolley), they’re in limited supply, and some people can’t hold them (nickel allergy, maybe?). Moreover, any pound coins I acquire in the future can also be valued at more than £1.
- scarcity
- permissionless trade
- privacy
- some people left out!
Excellent reasons for using a pound coin over other money. Now we can leverage financial markets for this future-looking pound coin trade.
I plan to capture this arbitrage and sell shares in my pound coin. I’m going to make two equal shares, keep one and sell the other for a pound. It’s a good deal for everyone because with two shares in issue and £2 in treasury, the post-money value of each share is £1.
Checks out, should work. I image the regulatory arbitrage/difficulty for pools of capital to access pound coins is somewhat lower than bitcoin<->old tradefi money, but whatever: we'll roll with it.
Next I’m going to sell another share for £2. I’ll have £4 in treasury and three shares in issue. The next buyer will be paying more than the value of their share of the treasury but it’s still a good deal for everyone because I’ll have improved the pounds-per-share ratio from 1:1 to 1.3:1. Selling the next share for £3 will further improve the ratio, which I’ll call pound yield. By selling shares in pounds and buying pounds with pounds, my direction of travel will be relentlessly positive. Here’s what it looks like as a chart.
Natural, organic, pound yield: INCREDIBLE!
There's even a GRAPH!
and a nice one:
It’s not a fail-safe strategy. Maybe I’ll eventually run out of buyers, or issue so many shares that it squeezes the pound-to-pound arbitrage towards zero.
Crypto’s more complicated. Tokens on a company balance sheet may or may not be held by a third-party custodian, whose statements the auditor might or might not consider reliable. A company choosing self-custody is under no obligation to make its wallet addresses public, and might not be honest about who else has access to the private keys.
(I really do wish they'd stop talking about "crypto." Tell me you're retarded without telling me you're retarded, basically.)
...and then the story goes on (foreeeveer...) about difficulty for accountants and hard to find the actual "tokens" blah-blah. Less interesting:
Guidance around how auditors check crypto reserves is onerously broad-brush and, when applied to private wallets, still can’t be relied upon to detect tricks like rehypothecation and multiple claims over the same assets. That none of the myriad companies now jumping on the crypto treasury bandwagon are exploiting these blind spots is possible, but is it likely? And if there are any bad actors out there, what external check might cause their deception to unravel? For an industry that made “Don’t Trust, Verify” one of its slogans, none of this seems optimal.
I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about bitcoin treasury companies; me too, frens, me too. (#1003228, #984224, #991218, #1003308)
full story here: https://archive.md/H0eEq