Saylor is building a fiat system on Bitcoin

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1t5_omegaHero Member
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#1Aug 25, 2023, 06:00 PM
Alright, let’s talk about the big issue here. Bitcoin was designed as a decentralized currency, a way to move away from the fiat systems run by governments and central banks that rely on debt. I see a lot of chatter about Michael Saylor and his firm, Strategy, but not much focus on a critical point: what he’s doing goes against the very reason Bitcoin exists. Honestly, I haven't seen anyone bring this up, and it's about time someone did. Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, that’s it. On the flip side, Saylor is setting up a debt structure with his so-called "digital credit" that’s backed by the Bitcoin he accumulates. Plus, he’s cranking out shares like there’s no tomorrow, just like central banks do. Right now, his company holds 843,738 bitcoins, but let’s check how many shares he’s issued: https://www.strategy.com/shares Keep in mind those figures are in thousands. So that 332,056 class A shares actually means 332,056,000 or 332 million shares. And that’s just the class A shares; preferred shares aren’t even counted. Also, look at how those numbers have shot up over each reporting period. He’s taking a limited asset and flooding the market with shares that could potentially be infinite, all based on trust. Initially, the belief was that MSTR would stay above 2 mNAV, then it was that Bitcoin would see a 30% CAGR over 20 years, and now he’s dialed it down to 2 or 3%. In other words, in the end, fa
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guru777Full Member
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#2Aug 25, 2023, 11:57 PM
We cannot stop anyone from doing whatever they want with Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin is the best form of money ever used by humanity, it was inevitable that bankers, BlackRock, Saylor, and various other fraudsters would eventually appear around it offer various financial products and “paper Bitcoin,” using the same kinds of manipulation and fraud that have been practiced with gold for centuries. Bitcoin has an advantage over gold because it will be much harder for fraudsters and bankers to manipulate. Bitcoin is relatively easy to hold in self-custody, giving people direct control over their own money.It is much easier to verify how much Bitcoin exists. With gold, it is far more difficult to verify how much is actually held in a vault or to take it into self-custody. That is why fraud and manipulation have been possible for so long.
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ape_nonceMember
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#3Aug 26, 2023, 05:30 AM
I understand your point clearly but first of all, Saylor does not claim he's preserving Satoshi original vision. He's trying to to turn bitcoin into the base layer for cooperate and capital market finance. Saylor is not creating or violating bitcoin money properties. The 21 million supply is fixed and can not be changed. Everything depends on the angle you are viewing from. If you are viewing from the point of censorship resistant, then Saylor is doing completely opposite but if you see bitcoin as money good, he's taking it to another level faster.
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max.wolfFull Member
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#4Aug 26, 2023, 11:40 AM
This is the problem (in my opinion): Michael Saylor is destroying Bitcoin's fundamental value. 🙋 What is Michael Saylor doing? He's removing Bitcoin from circulation. He doesn't even hide the fact that this is his primary goal. But then another question arises: if Michael Saylor and other institutional players remove Bitcoin completely from circulation, won't that mean a complete halt to transactions on the network? And how will miners make money in this situation? Considering that the network experiences a halving every four years, the cost of Bitcoin mining effectively doubles every four years. Michael Saylor also uses centralized Bitcoin storage (in Coinbase cold storage). This directly violates the principle of Bitcoin's decentralized storage. It creates a single point of failure in the system. As for his stocks and bonds, in my opinion, they can be considered surrogate Bitcoin.  It's as if someone were counterfeiting government banknotes but positioning themselves as the main defender of the monetary and financial system. 🤷
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sam.bullSenior Member
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#5Aug 26, 2023, 04:23 PM
I really really did expect people to be wiser after the ATMs few months ago Issuing of their shares feels infinite It's like running from an unlimited supply by the government to one by a company. But as a business man I would give it to him for using debt Since the world is a little bit biased towards debts. Bitcoin is decentralised Money I believe that should Answer your statement. Well Bitcoin is permissionless and I can choose if and when I want to spend my money. He's following from the POV of digital Gold how government hold golds. That's impossible and they gain nothing from it There's always a price they can't resist. They can only buy if there are people to sell.   Reward Is halved doesn't mean cost is doubled Cost is influence by different factor like location, energy Saylor says alot of things but actions show alot He doesn't really care much about Bitcoin It's emphasis is on it been digital Gold.
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CalmYieldSenior Member
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#6Aug 26, 2023, 08:57 PM
Saylor is a Billionaire doing Billionaire things.  Saylor is praising Bitcoin, Decentralization et cetera while he is grabbing all there is for his own well being.  If you thought he is saving Bitcoin and putting all that effort in making us all richer, it may be time to finally wake up to reality! Anyway.  The first culprits of this are the people who blindly purchase his shares like a herd of sheep.  When the Mount Saylor falls, get your selves ready for what is coming because all the idiots who blindly purchase and are all hyped up now will drop from the same cliff at the same time! ----- This will never happen.  Naturally, things will balance in such a way that some Bitcoin will still be in circulation.  The people who purchase Strategy shares, I assume they purchase as a way to avoid purchasing Bitcoin directly while also riding the Strategy hype.  Sounds very stupid considering how easy it is to store Bitcoin on your own but it is what it is. There is no such thing as removing Bitcoin completely from circulation.  In fact.  If there ever comes such a day, prepare to become rich as HELL as you will have a rarity you can barely find any where to purchase any more. This partially answers the question you raised above.  There is no way Bitcoin circulating supply is removed from circulation and Miners are one reason for it. Tell all the people who purchase his shares particularly this.  They do not care.  Their goal is one and only.  Making money.
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satoshi23Senior Member
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#7Aug 27, 2023, 01:26 AM
Many ways people own or use Bitcoin are against the original intent of Bitcoin's creation. Take ETFs, for example. What is the point of Satoshi creating a self custody asset/currency if people are just going to hand over that power to another company? It's one thing to leave your Bitcoin in an exchange, at least, even though you don't hold the keys, you can still withdraw the Bitcoin, if you want to (except things go wrong). With ETFs, you don't hold the bitcoin at all. And this is beneficial for Bitcoin's price, actually. The fewer coins in circulation, the higher the price if the demand remains the same. When you say "remove Bitcoin completely from circulation", you mean they all sold it off, right? In that case, they would all lose because triggering a selling frenzy like that would immediately crash the price, and since they hold more bitcoin than most, they would lose the most. More supply with the same amount of demand is equal to a lower price. The price will just keep going down as more and more people sell. As for miners, I'm still reading up on this stuff, so I'm not really sure about my answer, but so far, I understand that if the price of bitcoin becomes too low and it is totally unprofitable for miners to mine bitcoin, this would mean a lot of miners would go offline, thereby adjusting the difficulty adjustment.   Again, I don't fully understand the difficulty adjustment yet, but technically, it means you won't need so much power and expensive hardware to mine Bitcoin. Don't forget that there was a time people mined Bitcoin with just their laptops.
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1t5_omegaHero Member
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#8Aug 27, 2023, 04:17 AM
He doesn't buy P2P, he doesn't store his Bitcoins with his private keys, and what he does is act like a central bank, printing more and more shares instead of banknotes. Just as central banks hold gold reserves but banknotes are not redeemable for that gold, Strategy’s shares are backed by the Bitcoin it holds, but a shareholder cannot demand to be given x amount of Bitcoin in exchange for his shares, no matter how much “exposure” they have. That’s why I say that no matter how much he praises Satoshi in his speeches, what he’s actually doing runs counter to the very purpose for which Satoshi created Bitcoin.
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its_cipherSenior Member
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#9Aug 27, 2023, 05:36 AM
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5581343.msg66750105#msg66750105 You have raised a very important issue. What Strategy is doing is not immediately obvious, but it can have negative consequences. It will be interesting if in the end Michael Saylor announces the severance of the connection of his shares with bitcoin, as Richard Nixon announced in 1971 the abolition of the exchange of dollars for gold. It will be funny if the shares retain their value at the same time, because Strategy is "too big to fail"
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1t5_omegaHero Member
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#10Aug 28, 2023, 09:07 PM
Well, actually, if you had actually read and understood my former post you wouldn't talk about that analogy because that "severance" is by default.
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calmguruSenior Member
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#11Aug 28, 2023, 11:20 PM
Everyone has the freedom to do whatever they want with Bitcoin, that is one thing. But im happ that Bitcoin cant be heavily controlled by a few people. All those nodes around the world can be set up by anyone. The fact that the blockchain is immune to manipulation is another amazing feature. Im happy Bitcoin exists the way it does today. No matter what regulations the world do, we as people can stand up to them through peer-to-peer network and trade with each other legally. There is no third party to take some profit, only the miners who help us to verify the transactions.
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def1777Full Member
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#12Aug 29, 2023, 04:39 AM
There is no problem if he prints 10 billion shares. The important is the amount of bitcoin per share. And if he lies  the price of the share may collapse. For now  his website says about 220 shares per bitcoin https://www.strategy.com
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1t5_omegaHero Member
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#13Aug 29, 2023, 10:39 AM
There is a problem, that he has created a fiat system on top of Bitcoin, acting like central banks do. That's the point I am making here. You don't need to remind me of the Bitcoin per share concept, I've known about it since it was created but that's not what I am talking about here.
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john.cobraHero Member
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#14Aug 29, 2023, 01:48 PM
Well, anyone who understands what Bitcoin is has probably long understood that Saylor is working for his own interests and that Bitcoin is just a tool he uses to generate as much profit as possible. The problem is of course the way he does it, but to be honest, 90% of those who own Bitcoin believe that the more coins he buys, the higher the price will be. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. The real question is how far he can go in what he's doing, or how likely is it that the business will start to collapse at some point? These 840+ thousand BTC that he currently has is a huge amount that would destroy the price of BTC for a very long time in the event of the collapse of his company. Unfortunately, today Bitcoin has become too dependent on individuals, companies, funds, and politicians who have one common denominator - they are all from the US.
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max.wolfFull Member
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#15Aug 29, 2023, 05:52 PM
When I write about Bitcoin's complete withdrawal from financial circulation, this doesn't necessarily mean Michael Saylor and BlackRock will buy up all 17,000,000 coins (coins whose users have saved their private keys). To achieve his goal, Michael Saylor only needs to buy up all the coins used for payments in transactions. After that, the Bitcoin blockchain will be as merry a place as a graveyard.🙆 What will happen to miners? Their income from transaction fees will become zero... As for Bitcoin mining income, it won't be zero, of course, but it will decrease significantly, and mining costs will increase. This is the perfect combination for a commercial company to go bankrupt! Yes, Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism for reducing mining difficulty. However, mining difficulty cannot be reduced indefinitely! After a certain period of time, network security will deteriorate so much that a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin will occur. The worst-case scenario is that this situation worsens with a fall in Bitcoin's price. Because once investors realize that the actions of Michael Saylor and other institutional players are driving Bitcoin's price down, not up, they will begin selling en masse. This will further exacerbate the situation. In this case, governments could deal Bitcoin the final blow. To save the financial system, they could, for example, ban mining. 🤷
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paul.stakeHero Member
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#16Aug 30, 2023, 05:22 AM
Since when is issuing and selling shares contrary to the purpose of Bitcoin? Saylor is just taking advantage of the fiat system to build a bank that offers better returns than other banks. The fiat system is designed so that every business eventually becomes interest rate arbitrage business. This has nothing to do with central banks. Central banks create money out of thin air and force you to treat it as legal tender through the threat of violence. Everyone purchasing shares from Strategy does it voluntarily.
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p1x3l365Senior Member
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#17Aug 30, 2023, 07:32 AM
At least people buy Strategy shares voluntarily, not mandatory and it's better than buying shitcoins, though the leveraging strategy of Strategy recent years is actually a big risk for Strategy's investors. If people are aware about this, feel comfortable when voluntarily buying Strategy's shares, I think they're good with their choices and the rest will belong to the future. Bitcoin success in the future will be helpful for Bitcoin investors and for companies with derivative products related to Bitcoin like Strategy but investing money directly in Bitcoin will be safer than investing money in Strategy's shares and it won't change with time.
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#18Aug 30, 2023, 08:26 AM
Previously I liked him by always putting forward a maximalist who was like an ideology for himself even though maybe I wouldn't follow that for now but I quite like him who continues to say that he is a maximalist but indeed it seems that for now what he is doing with his claims is only an initial plan to continue his intention to gain momentum and create greater profits. From the beginning he was not even too open with wallet transparency because it was considered a privacy for himself but on the one hand he tried to develop the business he had, especially with the shares listed here on behalf of bitcoin. The problem is that when that is done in the end we also cannot intervene in whatever he does because it is even possible that he does not care about this which shows that actually even though he will claim many things about bitcoin including the maximalists he always echoes but of course personal gain will always make him slowly lose his way with the original goal. By looking at what he is doing now even though he will still be in the name of bitcoin but in the end he only wants to create an ideal system for personal gain with shares that always grow along with bitcoin purchases.
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im_apeHero Member
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#19Aug 30, 2023, 11:05 AM
Are we surprised? All these billionaire oligarchs care about their own wealth and how they can increase it. They may sometimes say stuff that we like (eg. praising the only decentralized money in existence) but the only thing they like is fiat and making more of that. They never cared about bitcoin either, regardless of what they say. Whether the oligarch is the billionaire Saylor praising bitcoin calling it "hope" and "freedom", or billionaire Buffett attacking it and calling bitcoin "rat poison". They both are the same and want to fill their pockets with more fiat increasing their own wealth. If they can do it with bitcoin as a tool, they'll not hesitate. They have both done that too!
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raven1337Hero Member
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#20Aug 30, 2023, 03:43 PM
Satoshi did not invent Bitcoin because he wanted a new investment instrument. It was not invented to make people rich. It was not invented as a hedge against the USD (which would have been stupid). "Number go up"--the mentality of 99.9% of today's Bitcoin holders--was not Satoshi's mentality. Bitcoin's ability to appreciate in value was an accident. Given his stated goals, Bitcoin would have been better off as some for of stablecoin, but he simply didn't build the (much more complex) system to do that. Bitcoin was created the way it was in order to solve one problem, which is making something that was illegal to do able to exist. Bitcoin's original purpose is totally pointless today: you no longer need to hide from the government to buy, hold or use digital currency. That's why there are many competitors of Bitcoin that work far better for Bitcoin's original purpose (e.g. stablecoins). So yes, what Saylor is doing on contrary to Satoshi, and perfectly in line with virtually all of today's Bitcoin holders: it's about making money. Nobody, except a few hard-cores, think of Bitcoin as anything but another investment instrument that competes with stocks, bonds, commodities, sports betting, meme coins, Polymarket, etc. Nobody cares about "decentralization" (which is why they will probably just centralized the architecture at some point), and the idea that Bitcoin is "above the government" is a just a silly myth to fool newbies into buying more BTC so the old whales can cash out.
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