MicroStrategy Buys $250M in Bitcoin, Calling the Crypto ‘Superior to Cash’

[jaysabi]

Michael Saylor's strategy regarding the commitment to bitcoin apparently caused anger in the S&P Dow Jones Indices, they decided to make the following adjustments to the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600 indices, including MicroStrategy Inc.which will be removed from the S&P SmallCap 600. The changes will take effect before the opening of trading on Monday, September 20, 2021, to coincide with the quarterly rebalancing: Healthcare Services Group will replace $MSTR MicroStrategy Inc. in the S&P SmallCap 600. MicroStrategy is no longer suitable for the S&P SmallCap 600, as well as United Insurance Holdings, according to a press release from S&P Dow Jones Indices. https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20210903-1443045/1443045_sept2021-546-shuf-rebal.pdf

The anger of the S&P Small Cap 600 Index is so baseless that they even mention that the MSTR strategy is no longer compatible with the index.  It seems to be fairer, they should explain more specific points.  Which strategy is not suitable, does the company open in BTC investments making the index problematic?  where is the problem.  Even so far, MSTR's share price has remained stable.  which market capitalization do they measure? CMIIW

There's a couple possibilities for why MSTR was dropped from the S&P 600 index.  The first and most likely is that the various S&P indexes try to track the US economy as a whole through companies in each major sector of the economy at various size levels.  Now that MSTR is basically trading as a bitcoin proxy, the reason it was originally added (exposure to technology companies in the US in the smallcap range) is no longer applicable and it no longer makes sense to include it.  The second possibility is that MSTR is too large to be in the S&P 600 now, since companies are added when they are between 0.7 and 3.2 billion in market cap, and at 6 billion now MSTR is too large for this index.  However, I think this second possibility is less likely.  The first makes more sense.  It has nothing to do "anger" over MSTR buying bitcoin and everything to do with an investment in MSTR no longer representing exposure to small cap technology companies and predominately representing exposure to bitcoin, which as was said in the press release, is not compatible with the purpose of the S&P 600.

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[fillippone]

MSTR's coins (and Saylor's personal stash as well) are not exactly "locked up"

His personal stash, maybe he can do whatever he wants with those, but I am guessing he has those under multi-sig and it will just be a hassle for him to actually do it.

The company stash, it's also very likely to be multi-sig with the board members,

<…>
How do you think he stores his bitcoin? 18k BTC personal stash, and company coins 108k BTC ... ... You have that much, better put they keys in some building with armed guards. Be your own bank. Literally.

The board is definitely not a multisig, it wouldn't make sense for several reasons.

This is an interesting research I can Try to diss over something about.
Definitely I would rule out any multisig option. I would rather think about a professional custodian. This would be much safer from every point of view: operational, legal and fiscal.
But yes, definitely I will try to find something about it.

Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor in a dialogue with Emily Chang on bloomberg TV
<…>

I am an embarrassment to myself. I was so obnubilated by Emily Chang hotness I didn’t even notice you posted the exact same link just before me.
Once again, well done.

[Dabs]

The board is definitely not a multisig, it wouldn't make sense for several reasons.  First, with any company, the board generally doesn't have access to bank accounts for the company so there would be no reason to give them such access with bitcoin through a mutlisig setup.  It's cumbersome and needlessly bureaucratic, and therefore unnecessary.  Also, the board doesn't really have any power to check Saylor due to his super majority voting power, so there's no reason for him to share responsibility with the board.  They serve as figureheads only with no real power in the company.  You definitely wouldn't give people like that responsibility to control any part of the company's day-to-day operations, which again would be needlessly bureaucratic.

In that case, it could still be multi-sig and he controls super majority of the keys. An example would be a 3-of-7 quorum, and he has all 7, but 2 other highly trusted employees (not necessarily part of the board, but usually are) have one key each, and the other 5 are kept as backups somewhere safe. Why? What if Michael Saylor the individual gets hit by a bus? The company has to survive and it would need access to the coins. Then one other key can be released by his lawyers or something like that.

The way he talks, it would seem unlikely he has the company bitcoins in third party custody.

I mean, you don't need to be separate individuals to do multi-sig. I do it myself, altho I usually use single sig to save on fees. I'm going to wait for full taproot to go live before doing any more multi-sig.

Otherwise we are looking at the next QuadrigaCX. (The exchange where the owner with sole possession of the keys died.)

[jaysabi]

The board is definitely not a multisig, it wouldn't make sense for several reasons.  First, with any company, the board generally doesn't have access to bank accounts for the company so there would be no reason to give them such access with bitcoin through a mutlisig setup.  It's cumbersome and needlessly bureaucratic, and therefore unnecessary.  Also, the board doesn't really have any power to check Saylor due to his super majority voting power, so there's no reason for him to share responsibility with the board.  They serve as figureheads only with no real power in the company.  You definitely wouldn't give people like that responsibility to control any part of the company's day-to-day operations, which again would be needlessly bureaucratic.

In that case, it could still be multi-sig and he controls super majority of the keys. An example would be a 3-of-7 quorum, and he has all 7, but 2 other highly trusted employees (not necessarily part of the board, but usually are) have one key each, and the other 5 are kept as backups somewhere safe. Why? What if Michael Saylor the individual gets hit by a bus? The company has to survive and it would need access to the coins. Then one other key can be released by his lawyers or something like that.

The way he talks, it would seem unlikely he has the company bitcoins in third party custody.

I mean, you don't need to be separate individuals to do multi-sig. I do it myself, altho I usually use single sig to save on fees. I'm going to wait for full taproot to go live before doing any more multi-sig.

Otherwise we are looking at the next QuadrigaCX. (The exchange where the owner with sole possession of the keys died.)

Extremely unlikely there is multisig in any fashion going on.  I also agree with Fillippone that I would expect that the coins are professionally custodied by Coinbase since I believe that is the company that is buying the coins on MSTR's behalf.  It would make poor business sense and be extremely risky to have Coinbase execute the trades and then move billions of dollars worth of coins to another wallet controlled by Saylor personally, or some combination of Saylor and the Board in a multisig set up.  I would be extremely shocked if those coins ever left the custody of whatever platform placed the trades to buy them, because there's no logistical or business reason for them to and only increased risk associated with doing so.

[fillippone]

Not much is disclosed about MicroStrategy strategy holding their stash.

All I could find is a declaration is actually one of their subsidiaries, called Microstrategy holding their bitcoins, as they previously disclosed.

detail on the newly formed company just to hold the coins: Macrostrategy.

MicroStrategy’s existing approximately 92,079 bitcoins will be held by a newly formed subsidiary, MacroStrategy LLC.

It is not immediately clear why Microstrategy want to create a new company (that would presumedly be 100% owned by Microstrategy) to hold his bitcoins.

Digging on their website I also found a document with a checklist on the checklist used to determine which kind of custody of the coins:



Not much informations however on how this checklist should direct the decisions about this:


Lastly, a declaration of Micheal Saylor spoke vaguely about “self-custody” without going much into details.
 MICHAEL SAYLOR: WE CUSTODY OUR BITCOIN AND DO NOT LEND IT OUT

In a recent interview at ETF Think Tank, Michael Saylor explained why his company purchases bitcoin directly, custody it themselves, and doesn't lend it out.

The fact that not many details about the custody scheme itself make me think. Security by obscurity is never a good approach, and this lack of details about the scheme makes me think it is way more weak than we think (thinking about the checklist mentioned in the first point).

[paxmao]

Crypto custody is quite in the rise. A local example in Spain is Prosegur, a company that traditionally had the armoured vans that carry money from banks and the like. That is obviously a business in decline, so they decided to open a branch to deal with crypto custody. If Microstrategy is doing its own custody, that could actually be a future line of business for an otherwise quite irrelevant company.

[Dabs]

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/microstrategy-ceo-michael-saylor-interview-the-predator-prey-dynamics-of-bitcoin

What if you’re a company? A corporation is going to take the view that they don’t want a single individual, they’ll want to have a multi-signature relationship when it comes to the custody of their Bitcoin and they’ll have more sophisticated custodial rules.

A government needs a different application also. If you were a citizen of a city, and the city put a billion dollars of Bitcoin on its balance sheet, would you want the mayor to carry the keys around? And by the way, if you were the mayor, would you want people to know that you actually have the keys? I mean wouldn’t you be concerned about being kidnapped and having your fingers ripped off one at a time? Or having a family member kidnapped?

So in that particular case they’re going to be interested in a different thing. That’s another application. That’s multi signature application. Who should be signing it? In some cases it’s not even multisig across people. It’s multisig across organizations like three agencies, or three corporations or auditors might need to have some involvement.

Whether or not Macrostrategy actually uses multi-sig or they trust a third party like Coinbase to custody it for them, it seems Michael Saylor understands how it works. It makes more sense to me that they're using multi-sig, but until they actually state that, we can only guess.

He is a rocket scientist after all.

Referring to other institutions he also says this:

It’s not always the case that the right answer is cold storage, hardware wallet, self custody. It depends upon who you are.

And he did buy some bitcoin recently, personally:

The other day I bought $30 worth of Bitcoin. I bought it on one application and paid a .69 cent fee. I went and I tried Strike and I paid next to nothing. I thought that’s kind of cool. Okay so thank you Jack Mallers, we appreciate that. Competition. It makes us all better. Right? There’s pressure. And that pressure will continue. When will that end? That won’t end.

So he's saying, cold storage and self custody might not work for others (implying that they are probably doing it) without clarifying that they are doing it.

He also knows about mining with an S19 miner .. or understands the math behind it. I don't think he's mining.

Bitcoin gets more secure, and more robust, and more antifragile. It’s not inflationary, because the protocol is locked in. The only result is the network decentralizes.

[fillippone]

And he did buy some bitcoin recently, personally:

The other day I bought $30 worth of Bitcoin. I bought it on one application and paid a .69 cent fee. I went and I tried Strike and I paid next to nothing. I thought that’s kind of cool. Okay so thank you Jack Mallers, we appreciate that. Competition. It makes us all better. Right? There’s pressure. And that pressure will continue. When will that end? That won’t end.

He personally owns roughly 17,000 bitcoins and still had to buy 30$ worth of bitcoin to test this new technology. I think this is commitment!

[The Sceptical Chymist]

He also knows about mining with an S19 miner .. or understands the math behind it. I don't think he's mining.

Somehow I don't think so either, but if he bought $30 worth of bitcoin just for the hell of it, that says to me that the man is hardcore.  I wouldn't be surprised if he not only mined bitcoin on the side but claimed from faucets in his spare time.  Lol.

Boy, their stock got hammered today, down over 4%.  But it was a rough day all around on the stock market, so I'm not shocked.  Related to that, I was listening to AM radio in my Lambo (double LOL) and the mainstream media news mentioned that bitcoin dropped significantly and that bitcoin-related stocks were also down.  That surprised me that there was a mention of bitcoin's performance on the radio--its status certainly has gone up since 2009.  The broadcaster also mentioned something to the effect that bitcoin hadn't achieved "safe haven status" yet, and that made me roll my eyes.  I don't think it'll ever be a safe-haven asset, nor do I think Michael Saylor sees it as such either.

[Daltonik]

Exclusive CEO interview Michael Saylor to bitcoinmagazine about the advantages of storing cash spent on buying bitcoin over traditional loans about the increasing acceptance of bitcoin as a means of payment and an optimistic perception of the future of bitcoin. "We realized that Bitcoin is a high-quality real estate with the lowest maintenance costs," says Michael Saylor.

Previously, the company invested 90% in sovereign debt and only 10% in cash, now these 90% are investments in bitcoin. But the mention in the final part of the article of Putin's retrograde, even in the context of creating a hype around bitcoin, was unnecessary, well, my perception is simple, but the giant stone coin of the Yap people as a currency in Russia - I liked this trolling ..

MICROSTRATEGY CEO MICHAEL SAYLOR INTERVIEW: THE PREDATOR PREY DYNAMICS OF BITCOIN

[jaysabi]

Lastly, a declaration of Micheal Saylor spoke vaguely about “self-custody” without going much into details.
 MICHAEL SAYLOR: WE CUSTODY OUR BITCOIN AND DO NOT LEND IT OUT

Thanks for posting this.  Although it doesn't seem likely to me, I agree it's possible they're literally custodying the bitcoin in a wallet that's not part of a professional service by themselves.  I just don't know why anyone would do this when it's billions of dollars at stake and it increases the risks.  Since he's couching the above quote though as a contrast to lending, I think it's more likely that he means that they keep the bitcoin (through a professional custodian like Coinbase) and do not lend it out, with the "custodying" just meaning the opposite of "lending".  In the article, he talks about how much that increases the risk for an extra 5% return.  But again, they could mean custodying it themselves in their own wallet, but I would be surprised if this is the case.

[Daltonik]

Michael Saylor and Raoul Pal discuss the changes that have occurred in the year since their first dialogue in the crypto industry, and also talk about digital property, digital energy, the introduction of bitcoin into the corporate segment, and the impact of regulation on the crypto world. https://www.realvision.com/shows/raoul-pal-adventures-in-crypto/videos/taking-the-sec-very-seriously

[Daltonik]

Michael Saylor is not concerned about the latest bans on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that are taking place in China.

About this and other things concerning the restrictions on the part of the SEC, the Executive Director of MicroStrategy tells Bill Barhidt, CEO of the crypto asset management company Abra, in a new interview that he was one of the first shareholders of Google, Facebook and Twitter. He says that at that time he was not particularly concerned about Chinese restrictions and now he is doing the same.

“If you had given up Google, Facebook and Twitter shares in 2010 because you heard that China was going to ban them, you would have lost obscene amounts of money. Trillions of dollars have been earned on technologies banned by China. I think what China is doing is pretty much irrelevant here, and of course it's getting ridiculous because, like every quarter for the last five, six, seven years, there has been a ban in China”" says Michael Saylor.  https://dailyhodl.com/2021/09/28/microstrategys-michael-saylor-says-china-crypto-ban-largely-irrelevant-for-bitcoin-heres-why/

[cafucafucafu]

Unlike CEO Michael Saylor, who has not sold any shares since 2012, some senior executives of MicroStrategy are ambivalent about the implementation of the bitcoin strategy-as an investment tool.

SEC documents show that MicroStrategy chief financial officer Phong Le and chief technology officer Timothy Lang offloaded the shares in August of this year, exercising approximately 30% of the options they received as compensation. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001050446/000119312521117745/d64521ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001050446/000119312521117745/d64521ddef14a.htm

source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/insiders-sold-microstrategy-stock-after-bitcoin-s-bull-run

I think that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

If they wanted to invest in crypto they could do it themselves after cashing out their MicroStrategy shares.

Overall a company is a pretty bad structure to be holding long term bitcoin assets with. Lots of regulation risk & probably not the most tax efficient.

[jaysabi]

Unlike CEO Michael Saylor, who has not sold any shares since 2012, some senior executives of MicroStrategy are ambivalent about the implementation of the bitcoin strategy-as an investment tool.

SEC documents show that MicroStrategy chief financial officer Phong Le and chief technology officer Timothy Lang offloaded the shares in August of this year, exercising approximately 30% of the options they received as compensation. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001050446/000119312521117745/d64521ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001050446/000119312521117745/d64521ddef14a.htm

source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/insiders-sold-microstrategy-stock-after-bitcoin-s-bull-run

I think that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

If they wanted to invest in crypto they could do it themselves after cashing out their MicroStrategy shares.

Overall a company is a pretty bad structure to be holding long term bitcoin assets with. Lots of regulation risk & probably not the most tax efficient.

I don't think it's tax-inefficient.  Because it's treated as property, as long as they're buying and holding (not moving, not selling) there is no tax implication until they create a taxable event (either selling or potentially moving).  The bizarre thing is that GAAP accounting rules require them to book a profit or loss on the unrealized gains (it's called mark-to-market) on a quarterly basis, but as these gains are unrealized there is no tax implication associated with them. 

[The Sceptical Chymist]

The bizarre thing is that GAAP accounting rules require them to book a profit or loss on the unrealized gains (it's called mark-to-market) on a quarterly basis, but as these gains are unrealized there is no tax implication associated with them. 

If I'm not mistaken (and I'm by no means an accountant), most corporations don't have to use mark-to-market accounting.  Financial companies do, or often do, but I'm not sure if MSTR is required to.

The reason I'm chiming in about this is because I remember reading a history of Enron, and Jeff Skilling was lobbying the company to use mark-to-market because it would allow Enron to value its assets however it wanted to (and they often overvalued the ones that were hard to value in order to inflate their balance sheet).

In any case, if a company is using that method of accounting, there's nothing really bizarre about having to report a profit/loss on a quarterly basis.  That's the whole point of m-2-m.

[FulxilCoris]

Well, Those are exchanges and their business is to exchange cryptocurrencies, not custody. I hope the elected place for custody is BitGo, the leader in the field of custody. Please note that BitGo is insured on their funds. and I don't see any downside in that, it appreciates adoption and encourages other institutions to join. But it's clear that it includes a lot of big names joining together with ordinary people who are also nostalgic. suspect. I can't wait to see how bitcoin and the entire crypto industry will work? out after that at least 2-3 years.

[arallmuus]

In general, if you look at this chart, you can see a clear buying strategy, they buy little during strong market movements (whether it be an increase or a fall) and make large purchases during price consolidations.

10-15M might seems like alot of money but its pretty niche compared to their bigger purchases and those small purchases was kinda like sending messages to the mass that Microstrategy will keep on buying and accumulating bitcoin. Pretty smart move from Saylor, didnt he tweet them up everytime he made that small purchases?

Well bitcoin hits 51k right now, so MSTR lets see if Saylor is going to tweet another purchase huh

[fillippone]

In fact, buying a billion on highs is offset by buying a billion at the very beginning of the pump. In general, if you look at this chart, you can see a clear buying strategy, they buy little during strong market movements (whether it be an increase or a fall) and make large purchases during price consolidations.

I tend to disagree here.

I think they are buying every month, roughly, with their excess cash reserves.
They are doing the bigger purchases via Debit Issuing or their ATM facility.
It looks like they are following a pattern, basically because the price has been trending up since they bought their first stash.

Just remember what Michael Saylor once tweeted:

https://twitter.com/michael_saylor/status/1440302444752244736?s=21

[Timelord2067]

It looks like they are following a pattern, basically because the price has been trending up since they bought their first stash.

I'm an advocate of buying a small amount of bitcoin regularly but being able to HODL what you have bought for multiple months or even multiple years depending on your end game with the budget you set yourself.

So, there are two questions:  Is the MicroStrategy strategy of seemingly regular purchases an up-scaled version of what I wrote above?  And, if so, what is MicroStrategy's end-game for the coins?  (i.e. dump at a given price?  Dump on a given date?  Or just HODL indefinitely?)