By pure chance I recently discovered this independent documentary called "Bitcoinners", which came out on 14th November 2024. To quote the abstract:

Bitcoinners is an independent documentary film that takes an inside-look at the grassroots movement of die-hard bitcoin devotees and why they think Bitcoin can save America. Filmed from 2021 to 2023, this film follows a group of bitcoin plebs in Texas, and includes key interviews with well-known bitcoin voices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcaQ-EifEJY

I wanted to share this documentary with everyone here, as the it focuses on the individual stories of people within the Bitcoin community and avoids covering any technical details of the blockchain. Instead it really highlights how Bitcoin influences our lives and ideologies. I feel that this documentary would be engaging and interesting even to audiences that are unfamiliar or don't understand Bitcoin.

Are you aware of any similiar documentaries or films that focus on personal stories and ideologies around Bitcoin?

[$90.645 billion USD]

MicroStrategy (MSTR) and its Executive Chairman, Michael Saylor, have gained significant attention in the last few weeks alone, mainly due to the company's strategy for acquiring significant Bitcoins, which has ramped up the company share price exponentially. Whilst MicroStrategy initially was a software company, they have really become a Bitcoin acquiring company, with their company valued based on their cryptocurrency holdings.

For most traditional investors, the idea of a company which owns Bitcoin as an investment, and doesn't really produce much income, or hold assets that produce income, they would expect that the market capitalisation (value of all shares in circulation sold at current price), would be equal or close to the Net Asset Value (NAV), which is the value of all Bitcoin they hold.

However, currently the market capitalisation of MSTR is $90.645 billion USD, whilst they hold 386,700 BTC Bitcoins worth $35.735 billion USD.

For most traditional investors, this doesn't really make any sense. They ask the question:

"Why is the market capitalisation 2.53x the net asset value?"

I am making this post to help answer this question, as like you, I was initially quite confused.

The answer ultimately is: Leverage.

MicroStrategy is able to borrow money from investors at 0% fixed interest, by giving them convertible bonds, that let them trade the bonds for company shares later (typically 5 years) if the shares become more valuable (typically 30% higher). However, if the value of the MSTR share price does not rise by the 30-50% threshold needed for the bondholders to covert their bonds to shares, the bonds simply remain as debt and must be repaid in the full face value.

So what this means is:

1. If BTC Bitcoin's price rises, MicroStrategy's acquired Bitcoin from the borrowed money would rise in value, and therefore improve MicroStrategy's net asset value and investor sentiment, driving up the stock price. This would then exceed the conversion price of the convertible bonds. Bondholder can then convert their bonds to equity (shares), diluting existing shareholders, but reducing MicroStrategy's debt obligations. This could create a positive feedback loop to attract more investors and driving the stock price even higher.

2. If BTC Bitcoin price plummets, MicroStrategy's acquired Bitcoin from the borrowed money would drop, as well as other holdings, and therefore the net asset value would drop. However, MicroStrategy would still be on the hook to cover the bond repayment to the bondholder and need the cash available to make this repayment in full. As MicroStrategy's investment strategy is to be low on cash reserves, this would mean the company would be required to sell off Bitcoin to raise funds for the repayment. However, this could exacerbate Bitcoin's price decline, and hurt investor sentiment, causing Bitcoin to decline even further, making a negative feedback loop.

So effectively this just means that MicroStrategy uses financial instruments like convertible bonds with debt and equity, to acquire Bitcoin, which amplifies the impact of Bitcoin's price on it's stock - Leverage.

Whilst I am super bullish on Bitcoin, and I do believe that MicroStrategy buying Bitcoin is good for the cryptocurrency industry as a whole, it is not an investment option I will choose, and I will stick to acquiring real Bitcoin myself. The leverage does increase exposure so that Bitcoin price movements will lead to greater earnings, however it's still very centralised, and you are not a custodian of the cryptocurrency yourself. I would rather do this myself.

I am interested to hear your thoughts. If you are bullish on Bitcoin, would you rather buy MicroStrategy, or Bitcoin itself?

References:
1. https://www.microstrategy.com/press/microstrategy-completes-3-billion-offering-of-convertible-senior-notes-due-2029-at-0-coupon-and-55-conversion-premium_11-21-2024
2. https://www.microstrategy.com/press/microstrategy-announces-pricing-of-convertible-senior-notes-11-20-2024

[Watch Now:]

This is a MUST WATCH, for anyone interested in Bitcoin.

The "Gold Bless Bitcoin" movie has been uploaded and you can watch it here for free:

Watch Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4xuRZYLpgk

As per IMDB, the summary is:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32881100/plotsummary/

God Bless Bitcoin asks the timely question: How do we fix our broken money? Through in-depth conversations with bitcoin and interfaith religious leaders, the film exposes the broken, unjust, and immoral nature of our current fiat-based monetary system, one that is intimately connected to the military industrial complex and the propagation of war. The film also shows how and why members of the poor and middle class feel a financial squeeze even when they work hard and lead fiscally responsible lives. God Bless Bitcoin ultimately suggests the ways in which bitcoin can present alternatives to our current system that are more just, equitable, and peaceful.


This covers quotes from all of our favourites, such as Michael Saylor, and many others. What was your favourite quote from the movie?

Michael Saylor at BTC Prague presented "his" 21 rules of bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PkMFIa7rmQ

The rules by themselves, might not mean something to you. They have layers of deep meaning. I highly recommend you watch the video. What do you think of these rules, what do they mean to you?

1. Those who understand, buy Bitcoin. Those who don't, criticize Bitcoin.
2. Everyone is against Bitcoin before they are for it.
3. You will never be done learning about Bitcoin.
4. Bitcoin is powered by chaos.
5. Bitcoin is the only game in the casino that we can all win.
6. Bitcoin won't protect you if you don't wear the armor.
7. Bitcoin is the one thing in the universe that you can truly own.
8. Everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve.
9. Only buy Bitcoin with the money you can't afford to lose.
10. Tickets to escape the matrix are priced in Bitcoin.
11. Bitcoin insight is restricted to those with a need to know.
12. All your models will be destroyed.
13. The cure to economic ill is the orange pill.
14. Be for Bitcoin, not against Fiat.
15. Bitcoin is for everyone.
16. Learn to think in Bitcoin.
17. You don't change Bitcoin, it changes you.
18. Laser eyes protect you from endless lies.
19. Respect Bitcoin, or it will make a clown out of you.
20. You do not sell your Bitcoin.
21. Spread Bitcoin with love.

As per the article for further reading: https://cointelegraph.com/news/samourai-wallet-not-guilty-plea-bail-released

Keonne Rodriguez, one of the co-founders of Samurai Wallet has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and money laundering.

The condition of his bail include:
(1) prevented from engaging in “any cryptocurrency transactions, directly or indirectly,” without prior approval from the court.
(2) travel restricted to parts of New York and Pennsylvania when not confined to his home.

The first condition of his bail seems insane, he is restricted from engaging in any cryptocurrency transactions, even indirectly. The US government will be like a hawk at the moment keeping an eye on his cryptocurrency assets. It's a sad day, the US is not a safe place for cryptocurrency holders.

How enforceable is his conditions of bail, and what are your thoughts on it?

What precedent does this bail condition set for the future of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin projects founded from the USA?

According to CoinGecko, there are over 2.5 million cryptocurrencies (read more here: https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/how-many-cryptocurrencies-are-there).

Whilst these are classified as cryptocurrencies, the reality is that the majority of these are actually just tokens, primarily on the Ethereum or Solana Blockchains.

Almost all (99.9%+ based on my opinion) of these are coins or tokens that have no purpose, and provide no value. They are centralised, have often unlimited supply or have been pre-mined with distributions allocated to the owners. The only intention of these projects is to make the creators richer, and take value away from everyone else.

The 1000th cryptocurrency by market capitalisation is GYEN with a market capitalisation of $13.38M according to CoinMarketCap (read more here: https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/). Therefore, these 2.499m remaining coins clearly have any negligible valuation in the market, and should just be considered trash.

Whilst it can be easy to see that a significant portions of these coins are either scams, pump and dumps, or have had their daily volume manipulated to appear like speculative investments, there are still a lot of other coins, even in the top 1000 that you should be cautious of.

Some of the highest market capitalisation alt coins, still do not provide the real world value that their white papers have intended. Whilst yes there may be a few examples of real world use cases using the technology, how many holders of the coin actually use it for its desired functional purpose, rather than just sitting on it and hoping the price increases so they can sell? These are speculators and traders, and not investors. You do not want to hold something which others are primarily speculating on.

Let's also take BNB as an example. A market capitalisation of $86.74 Billion and ranked as the #4 coin overall. It is developed and owned by a private company, Binance. Their objective primarily is profit for their company. Yes the owners have alterior and philosophical plans, but ultimately they need to keep their company profitable. They have offered some technologies, like Binance Smart Chain, and they have their own exchange, but we cannot forget that they MUST turn a profit on their projects as an organisation, and releasing a coin like BNB is to benefit THEIR interests primarily. They can and will change things as they please, you do not want to hold something where the rules can change at any moment.

The same applies to many other top coins even with $100m+ market caps. You must ask yourself when you are investing your money, is the intention of the project to actually make a meaningful difference or change to society, and is it following through in the current day on that objective?

Currently the only option to invest in and hold over the long term is Bitcoin. It is the only truely decentralised cryptocurrency, with a finite supply and being used for its original intention on a regular basis - a storage of wealth that is not impacted by inflation, and the ease of making borderless transactions.

What I am ultimately getting at here in the theme of my post is that there is no other coin besides Bitcoin, which you can trust can be held over the long term. What are your thoughts?

For those that participate in Bitcoin Signature Campaigns, a significant number of UTXOs are generated which impede their ability to spend or use their coins, and the costs associated with the transfer by the campaign manager are also high and inefficient.

I haven't participated in any signature campaigns on BitcoinTalk, but I have observed this and I am curious on what current members think about the topic of Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) and signature campaigns.

Currently there are a lot of signature campaigns run paying $40 - 50 USD of BTC per week, however transaction fees are sitting around $3 - 50+ USD per week at the moment, particularly post Bitcoin halving.

For anyone that has participated in these campaigns if they wish to sell or trade their coins, they'll have a ton of UTXOs and so the fees calculated to combine these could be immensely high. Even if currently the fiat value is not absurdly high, long term when the fiat price of BTC continues to rise, they will look back and recognise how much BTC they had to pay to spend these coins.

Is there any fix or solution to this?

The only thing I can imagine is that Bitcointalk.org offers an escrow service of some kind where users are sent coins directly as transfers on the forum, similar to the sMerit system, but they can be withdrawn at a certain amount. That way 10 weeks of campaign participation result in 1 UTXO via withdrawing from Bitcointalk forum escrow rather than multiple directly from the campaign manager. The development and security efforts required may not be worth it, but curious to hear your perspectives.

Could it theoretically be possible to perform a network attack on nodes to influence the difficulty adjustment algorithm of Bitcoin mining, by providing inaccurate timestamps?

As this is the technical section of the forum, I will assume that readers of this thread have an existing intermediate level of knowledge on Bitcoin mining, and so I won't define all concepts here. However, given the decentralised nature of the Bitcoin blockchain there is a reliance on the use of time, and timestamps, to create the chain of mined blocks, and determine the difficulty adjustment algorithm.

In the early days it was very easy to mine Bitcoin rapidly on a CPU on a single personal computer, as the set difficulty was much lower. What if it would be possible to influence a Bitcoin node into believing the current time, is a date far in the past where the difficulty was lower, and therefore it might be easier to mine a block and get newly generated Bitcoins as a reward?

To start building a possible attack chain to alter the timestamp of a Bitcoin node, we must first understand how Bitcoin nodes and blocks define their time. To quote some reading from here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_timestamp

Each block contains a Unix time timestamp. In addition to serving as a source of variation for the block hash, they also make it more difficult for an adversary to manipulate the block chain.

A timestamp is accepted as valid if it is greater than the median timestamp of previous 11 blocks, and less than the network-adjusted time + 2 hours. "Network-adjusted time" is the median of the timestamps returned by all nodes connected to you. As a result block timestamps are not exactly accurate, and they do not need to be. Block times are accurate only to within an hour or two.

Whenever a node connects to another node, it gets a UTC timestamp from it, and stores its offset from node-local UTC. The network-adjusted time is then the node-local UTC plus the median offset from all connected nodes. Network time is never adjusted more than 70 minutes from local system time, however.

If you generated and run sufficient Bitcoin nodes with an altered internal clock, then other nodes could connected to it, then the "Network-adjusted time" which is the median of timestamps returned by all nodes connected to you, could be adjusted to an arbitrary time where the difficulty algorithm is weaker.

Therefore, would it be possible to manipulate a victim Bitcoin nodes' view of the current time, and make it believe the date is 2009 or 2010 as example to mine blocks faster and easier?

Note: At present I believe this is a theoretical attack and not practical as you would need significant resources and compute to influence Bitcoin nodes median network clock time.