Bitcoin Leverage Is a Trap

In a recent interview on the Coin Telegraph YouTube channel, Peter takes aim at the growing use of leverage to buy Bitcoin, focusing on Strategy’s (formerly Microstrategy) debt-fueled strategy and its risks for ordinary investors. He warns that borrowing to buy a volatile asset creates fragile finance that can wipe out retirements, and he contrasts Bitcoin’s speculative appeal with his preferred hedges against currency debasement.

To start, Peter takes on the public relations around financing schemes like crypto entrepreneur Michael Saylor’s “Stretch” stock. He explains why transparency about a Ponzi-like structure doesn’t change its economics, and why borrowing to pay current holders with new borrowings is classic Ponzi finance: Can I Say That?: Why F... Carmichael, Dr. Chloe Check Amazon for Pricing.

So that’s classic Ponzi, and Saylor tries to claim it’s not a Ponzi because they’re being very transparent about the fact that it’s a Ponzi, and, you know, transparency doesn’t change the nature of what’s going on. What separates Ponzi finance from legitimate finance is you borrow money and then you have earnings to repay the debt. But if you borrow money and the only way you can repay the debt is to borrow more money from new people to repay the old people, that’s a Ponzi whether you want to hide the fact that you’re doing it or whether or not you want to be wide open and transparent.

He then lays out the practical downside of this structure: interest costs plus price risk. If Bitcoin falls when sellers must liquidate, losses magnify and the scheme becomes far more dangerous:

And the problem is when it comes time to sell the Bitcoin back to pay the money that you borrowed to buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin could be a lot lower. So there can be huge losses in addition to the interest that is being paid, the 11 and a half percent interest. So look, I think this whole thing is just a desperate scheme cooked up by Saylor to try to keep this thing going.

Peter predicts the likely tactical response when the pressure really mounts: suspend payouts rather than dump the underlying Bitcoin. That may postpone the problem for the company but it leaves shareholders holding illiquid paper:

I think when push comes to shove, I don’t think Saylor will sell Bitcoin. He will stop the dividend on stretch. I think he will just suspend it and just crash the market for Stretch rather than selling Bitcoin and then crashing the market for Bitcoin, which is going to crash everything anyway. So I think he would rather just say, well, we’re not going to pay Stretch for a while and let the price of Stretch go down. Now, of course, when that happens, he can’t buy more Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is going to go down anyway, but it would go down a lot faster if he started selling it.

One of Peter’s key points is the sheer scale of Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings and how that interacts with market liquidity. Holding a large fraction of the supply means those coins aren’t permanently out of circulation, and if forced selling ever happens liquidity will be insufficient: The King Is Coming: It... Bevere, John Check Amazon for Pricing.

And it shows that the Bitcoin that Strategy holds on to are not permanently out of circulation. He owns almost 4% of the Bitcoin supply, which is a lot, especially in relation to the liquidity to buy that supply on any given day. But still we saw that, as you mentioned, Bitcoin price hasn’t moved after this announcement. It didn’t crash. So the confidence is still there.

Finally, Peter acknowledges he’s not blind to the debasement story that drives some to Bitcoin, but he makes clear his preference for other sound-money hedges. He admits he owns assets that benefit when the dollar weakens, and he is less confident that Bitcoin will reliably perform compared with those other assets:

So I think I already have a big bet on the debasement trade. I own a lot of assets that are going to go up as the dollar is debased as people move away from the dollar. Maybe Bitcoin will go up too. I don’t know. I don’t have as much confidence that Bitcoin will go up as I do that the other assets that I own will go up. And I think there’s more upside potential in those assets. I think gold and silver mining stocks have a better chance of going up five times, ten times in price than Bitcoin does.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

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