this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
743 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
72592 readers
6760 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would they in the first place? It would be like a newspaper buying gold. If investors want to buy bitcoin they can just do that.
If i understood it correctly, meta wants to slap its own crypto-currency on everything.
That was called Libre
Buying BTC doesn't help them do that.
"our crypto is backed in value by bitcoin"
They're selling shares of their company, META stocks, to the shareholders that then vote on their liquidity portfolios. Not selling Crypto. Owners of a hypothetical META crypto don't benefit from or have any say in how the company operates.
Alternatively to BTC they could spend that money on holding their own hypothetical crypto so as to create market cap and buy/sell volumes appealing to crypto investors.
But now they're essentially just a bitcoin proxy, they even changed the logo to have a bitcoin on it.
Now that there's lots of ETFs and stuff, why buy Microstrategy and not just bitcoin?
Their value-add is that they financialize their bitcoin holdings to grow their bitcoin-backed shares faster than the bitcoin itself. Higher risk than just holding bitcoin or ETFs that just hold bitcoin, but something like 30-40% better returns.
In good times. We're yet to see how they do in a bitcoin winter.
What does "financialize their bitcoin holdings" mean? Do you mean they use leverage (i.e. debt) to buy bitcoin than they could otherwise? That's nothing new and is a common ETF strategy (see BITX). And yeah, it also means the bad times hit much harder.
They issue "convertible notes", which this coindesk article explains far better than I could because I am not a finance head and honestly do not fully understand them.
Yep, that's leverage. They sold notes which can be converted to shares of microstrategy. So while they don't have to issue more shares right now (which would dilute shareholders and lower the value of individual shares), they will have to in the future given the conditions on the convertible notes. If they have to convert those notes into shares while the price of bitcoin is dropping, it's a double whammy because the value of their holdings (which their value is entirely based on) drops AND they're diluting individual shares by having to issue more shares. This wards off investors which will tank the price even more.
If you own a share of meta then you own a share of meta and meta owns a mix of assets ranging from physical to various liquidity, whether its USD or BTC there isn't any difference in this regard.
Apparently GameStop are considering it too.
Yeah but GameStop's entire existence depends on crypto meme hype, while Meta's depends on extracting our data as efficiently as possible
is gamestop even relevant anymore
Gamestop already did last week
I’m out of date then.
Because holding USD is a liability these days.
Is it?
Seems like petrodollars have been riding high for decades.
!remindme in one year
Since you've missed the news, the USA has been overtaken by a fascist christian white supremacist party who gut social programs, cut science funding, literally completely disbanded the department of education, increased the defficit, and enacted large Tariffs on every other nation.
For the third time (assuming you don't count Congressional cycles) in twenty years. I've spent a solid 13 of the last 25 years living under a Christian Fascist presidency. Why am I supposed to assume that will devalue the dollar this time around?
You're either pretending this administration isn't worse than any previous example or you are woefully naïve.