Fans of bitcoin bridle at the idea that the digital token is little more than a fashionable bauble. They should be so lucky. Symbolist paintings, Fabergé eggs and Superman comics are all fetching record prices, despite their notable lack of utility. Meanwhile, bitcoin has slumped. Adherents are now battening down the hatches.

Michael Saylor is one who is getting ready for things to get worse before they get better. ... This strategy is not working so well at the moment. The stock is down more than 30 per cent over the past month, underperforming its underlying bitcoin. On Monday, Saylor said Strategy had set aside $1.4bn to hold not bitcoin but US dollars, as a “reserve” to cover dividend and coupon payments on its various capital instruments. Crypto-purists may flinch at the idea of Strategy holding common-or-garden cash. Adding some fiat currency to the balance sheet — just like a regular company might — isn’t a bad way to ride out the coming winter, though.

That doesn’t bode well for Strategy. To thrive, rather than survive, it needs to trade at a premium to its underlying bitcoin, which it did until recently. That helps it to sell preferred shares that convert at higher future prices, providing it with cheap capital to invest in more bitcoin.

Investors buying these securities, meanwhile, need to believe that Saylor can keep selling more and more of them, at even higher future prices, to make their own maths stack up.

The flywheel is difficult to maintain if crypto’s animal spirits turn out to have been durably damped down. Should Strategy find itself stuck in a valuation rut, unable to bring in new funds at premium prices, it really would be simply a bet on “number go up”. A bitcoin treasury that can’t outperform its main asset is no more useful than a Fabergé egg, and a lot less pretty.