So many eyes on me that I didn't even get through dinner with friends before @SimpleStacker had complained that my Bitcoin Magazine piece wasn't plugged on Stacker yet (#1019573).
Shame.
Should have dropped the cutlery and the socializing... and went straight to SN. Maybe vibe-code an auto-publish Bitcoin Magazine articles via den to ~econ??
Then again: Stackers (esp reading ~econ) have this wonderful chance for a front-row seat to what I'm thinking at any given moment. If you've been paying attention to my endless posts about the treasury companies in recent weeks (#984224, #1003228, #1011075, #1010082), it's not exactly surprising that there's now a piece out there aggressively ranting.
Well, not exactly ranting. I'm carefully sassy and purposefully eloquent, taking a step back and asking some flowy questions about what in the world we're doing here.
Simplestacker quoted my financial-history/perpetual motion machines quote already, so I'll pick another few favorites extracts:
Fast-forward a mere three years and we made the Ponzi business great again. Bitcoin 2025 saw announcement after announcement by bitcoin treasury companies launching one daring and aggressive financial engineering attempt after another.
Supposedly, the way bitcoin reaches the heavens or even the plebian masses now is not a mass exodus from financial institutions and a fulfillment of a dreamy cypherpunk destiny, but through heavily speculative, ridiculously complicated financial plays that turn equities and fixed-income securities into funding pools for buying bitcoin.
"For how can a bitcoin, wrapped in a corporate charter, suddenly be worth double, triple, or ten times the most liquid, observable and obviously indisputable price on the planet?"
What extreme value-added transformation does our orange coin undergo the moment you take it under your financially leveraged wings and promise to issue debt, preferred stock, and equity against it — in “waves of credit bubbles,” we hear the ghost of Satoshi faintly whisper.
Bitcoin treasury companies are hardly what Satoshi had in mind when he created a new electronic cash system to make third-party, financial middlemen obsolete. In sixteen short years, we turned Satoshi’s great discovery into the very thing he tried to exit.
aaaand this:
If I’m wrong, and the “capital pump to accelerate the flow of capital from bonds to bitcoin” accelerates hyperbitcoinization, I’ll be the first to celebrate. In the meantime, I implore you, beloved financial engineers of the world, to please explain to me — preferably like I’m five — why all these shrewd shenanigans won’t simply implode.
And yeah, HODL agrees with me. 'NUFF SAID!
P.S., @Car, this was written well before your rant (just delays and fiddling in editorial); you are, once again, cordially invited to spell out your anger with Mr. Bailey. (Use as many depletives as you like.)
P.S.S.: I try to be clever and whatever, but HODL obvs brings the thunder. My god, it's funny: