Several companies are selling crypto stockpiles in effort to fund share buybacks, shore up stock prices.
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Crypto hoarders dump tokens as shares tumble
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Sadly, the market for money laundering and sanctions evasion seems to be a growth market -- at least in the near term -- so cryptocurrencies won't completely crash and burn anytime soon.
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The demand for investor cash for AI might have caused some to move resources from crypto to AI triggering this crash. It could also signal that legitimate money is drying up for AI investment.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Bears repeating they don't make an LOL big enough for things like this (and what it will hopefully, finally lead to).
Can't wait for the real tanking where a couple "coin types" go under each week until finally one day Bitcoin fails. There were zero fundamentals behind crypto from the begginning. Basically a way for some highly shady individuals to get rich off of other people's gullibility / stupidity (while also doing all they could to nullify anything good happening on the climate front). I guess that whole not-a-store-of-value, not workable as payment in the real world, and other "boomer stuff" turned out to be true?
Next up: NFTs. Still SMH at that one. Everywhere we look parlor trick solutions in search of problems but people buy into it because "I saw an article somwhere and it sounds neat!" Keeping up with the Tech-Joneses?
Can't wait for the real tanking where a couple "coin types" go under each week until finally one day Bitcoin fails. There were zero fundamentals behind crypto from the begginning. Basically a way for some highly shady individuals to get rich off of other people's gullibility / stupidity (while also doing all they could to nullify anything good happening on the climate front). I guess that whole not-a-store-of-value, not workable as payment in the real world, and other "boomer stuff" turned out to be true?
Next up: NFTs. Still SMH at that one. Everywhere we look parlor trick solutions in search of problems but people buy into it because "I saw an article somwhere and it sounds neat!" Keeping up with the Tech-Joneses?
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Anti Jimmy
Ars Centurion
I don't follow business news or crypto, so I don't really understand any of this. Could someone explain in simple terms the business model of crypto-hoarding company like Strategy and their copycats? What exactly do they do (or say they do), and how does it apply in other industries like those mentioned in the quote?
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Or plant the bulb and enjoy the flower each spring. Depending on your tax jurisdiction, count it as a landscaping expense.
An unmentioned bubble might be the power generation bubble. A lot of money is being spent on generators and grid improvements to support AI and general purpose data centers. If AI pops, a lot of utilities will be asking regulators to let them pass the expense on to the remaining users, i.e. most of us.
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If there were any value to Bitcoin (stop laughing, I’m trying to make a point), the company could use its Bitcoin to buy back all of its stock and still have Bitcoin leftover with no debts on it. It’s actually great news for the company. Just remember the “if” at the beginning of this paragraph…
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At least upgrades to the power grid can be repurposed - e.g. for charging electric vehicles, water desalination, growing manufacturing (or converting existing manufacturing like cement and metals refining from fossil fuel to electric), etc. Power is inherently useful, and if it temporarily becomes cheaper, that will just incentivize people to put it to use. E.g. the cheaper electricity becomes, the more compelling an EV becomes.
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"I never said that! I told people before crypto was even invented that it was a bad idea! It's Biden's fault! It's making white male Americans wealthier! People are saying! We need to invade Madagascar! Fake libtard news! Raise tariffs!"
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I can hope the crypto bubble bursts, unleashing a flood of cheap secondhand GPUS, but I'm not holding my breath.
This line leaped out at me:
This line leaped out at me:
because film productions and EV startups scream money laundering and I'm sure vaping has some shady investors too.
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Borrowing money to buy bitcoin, then borrowing more money against that bitcoin to buy back your own stock...
The world of finance made a crazy wrong turn a long time ago and is way, way off the reservation now.
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Everyone except Melania. I respect her the way you respect a cockroach surviving a nuclear war.
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Modern society is built upon currency being traceable, without that the whole tax system faulters.
It makes no sense to me that crypto is legal.
All it does is facilitate crime.
It makes no sense to me that crypto is legal.
All it does is facilitate crime.
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Fortunately, GPU mining is a thing of the past- Ethereum went Proof of Wealth a while back to remove the need for the Ethereum-rich to do pesky things like invest in hardware to get Ethereum-richer, and to be anything approaching profitable mining Bitcoin you have to use ASICs made by a single provider based in China.
So decentralized.
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That's some pretty hopey changey weak sauce right there.
TBH when the multi hundred billion dollar airdrops for infra stop -- that's when we say investment in AI is drying up. This is pocket change compared to those movements.
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Yes. They poured a vast amount of their wealth into nukes, planes, subs, ships, tanks, and missiles for several decades. As with any economy, none of that comes for free; any resources spent on the military are necessarily unavailable for other uses.
All heavily militarized countries run into this problem. The USA in 2025 spent $2600 per capita on its military. At a GDP per capita of $86,000 that is not breaking the bank, overall. But it does mean that a lot of people are living in poverty and getting substandard educations in order to allow those resources to go to the military instead of to schools and social programs.
The Soviets spent about double what the Americans did, as a proportion of total economic activity, on their military. You cannot piss away 15% to 20% of your gross national income on weapons for any length of time without provoking a crisis. Which they did. Often. And finally it brought them down.
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Let the people using it for criminal purposes keep thinking it is untraceable.
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It's really depressing hoping for the bubble(s) of AI and crypto to pop while also knowing that, despite having no money or stake it in at all, will still make your life worse because of all the money invested in it that you had no control in. It's like being a kid hoping your terrible alcoholic parent gets what's coming to him but also knowing your life will be even more negatively affected than it already was.
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The obvious solution is to use all those shiny new guns and bombs to capture someone else's economy. Important note: when picking "someone else", aim for a country significantly weaker than Ukraine.
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First thing I thought of when I read that. What a weird way to live, worshipping an imaginary currency.
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Saying that the stock is worth less than the BTC that they hold is a bit misleading. The value of MSTR stock plus their preferred stock (STRD, STRK, etc) is roughly equal to the value of the BTC that Strategy currently hold at today's BTC USD prices. This ignores debt (which Strategy weirdly add to the value of their outstanding stock when calculating their "mNAV" but that's a different topic).
It will be interesting to see if they pay out the STRD dividend at the end of December or not.
It will be interesting to see if they pay out the STRD dividend at the end of December or not.
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I’m selling all my crypto to buy tulip bulbs. Historically, that’s a safer investment. At least in the end you got pretty flowers.
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"Strategy" actually used to be MicroStrategy (MSTR), a boring SaaS business. Then Saylor went all-in on just buying crypto.
For a time, it was an infinite money glitch:
1) Microstrategy would issue new shares or loans, then use the proceeds to buy bitcoin.
2) The buy pressure on BTC (and the hype of MSTR buying more and Saylor going on CNBC to hype things up) would drive the price of BTC up.
3) So now MSTR's hoard is nominally worth more. So their shares are worth more. So they can issue more shares or debt to buy more BTC. Goto step 1.
It works really well if there's also underlying pressure driving the BTC price up, or when they were one of limited ways an institutional investor could get exposure to crypto.
Step 2 also works just as fast in the opposite direction. If they have to sell BTC to make loan payments, it'll drive the price down, which will drive their hoard's value down, which will drive their share price down.
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I would not put AI and BTC in the very same bucket. The first one can be used as a tool to support people and therefore it has value. Probably not as much as the market says but it has value. BTC has no value, it serves no purpose besides speculation and/or illegal purposes.
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Correct. Bitcoin isn't pushing the frontiers of science. Bitcoin cannot perform 10% of low-level clerical work. Bitcoin is nothing but a meme.
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King Trump can well afford to but bitcoins and lose money on them as well But the average person who lives paycheck to paycheck, then well you are out of luck , go exchange your bulk pennies at the local Wal-Mart
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“Volatility is Satoshi’s gift to the faithful,” said Saylor.
"Heh-heh," he added under his breath. "By which I mean 'foolish'."
"Heh-heh," he added under his breath. "By which I mean 'foolish'."
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That sort of happened, but also sort of didn't because AI bros started buying up all those surplus GPUs.
Thing is, most of the cryptocurrencies have moved onto mining using special-purpose mining chips that are even faster than GPUs for mining.
The last holdout for awhile was Etherium. But then Ether moved to proof-of-stake and got out of proof-of-work for mining, and when that switch was made, a bunch of crypto miners no longer had any use for their GPUs, so there was a bit of surplus GPUs to buy secondhand.
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Yes and no. AI is going to help... put people out of work, but will work great for those few greedy, fat corporate fucks make them more disgustingly richer. I'm not against capitalism but when you have ~1000 people that hold more wealth than most smaller nations, yet people are starving, dying in squaller and don't want to do a fucking thing about it, fuck them i hope they lose it all.
America; Fuck you, I got mine.
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Well the saying is that "Ancaps only exist to be wrong about everything."
I won't shed any tears if they all learn that.
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Arguably making work no longer be necessary—to the extent that LLMs are actually able to do this, which is... highly debatable—is a generally good thing. Put another way, it is hard to see how making people do work that does not need to be done by a human being for its own sake is inherently a good thing.
To the extent that people losing jobs is problematic, it is because they need to have a "job" at all in order to survive in our society. However, this is an inherent problem of our current economic system, not something we are encountering for the first time due to AI. The solution is not preserving these jobs (except insofar that LLMs are an inferior substitute) but increasing social supports. Also, we really need to collectively rethink this notion that people even should need to work as much as they do for our society to successfully function. We could make an incremental step in this direction by reducing the standard 5 day work week to 4 days, which I have heard has been shown by various studies show is likely to make us collectively more productive despite the reduction in total hours worked.
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