u/nacreon

So I know most people either grew up in the area or had a parent that was a fan of the team which caused them to start following the team.

I have neither of those. In fact, how I became an Angels fan was due to pure chance and is possibly one of the stupidest reasons to become a fan of a team that I can think of.

When I was younger I followed football almost exclusively (Packers, family is all from Wisconsin) but I also followed basketball since my grandpa would sometimes take me to Suns games since he was living down in Arizona by then. I didn't have a baseball team to follow.

So 5 year old brain me decides, you know what, I need to fix this. I collected baseball cards and decided that I would randomly select a card and I would follow that team. I don't remember who the player I picked but low and behold it was an Angels player and I have followed them ever since. I also decided to pick one for my brother which ended up being the Blue Jays and they shortly after won back to back world series.

I followed them pretty loosely but didn't end up start watching games until the season they signed Mo Vaughn. I remember getting really excited for the season and the first game Mo Vaughn falls into the dugout injures himself.

The 'value' of bitcoin isn't the product itself. It's the leads. Think about it, if you have some sketchy financial product you're trying to push onto someone, the hardest job you have is finding people that can be convinced it's a good idea.

Bitcoin generates the leads for you. The biggest resource an exchange has is the customer data. Think about it, thousands if not millions of people that paid real money to say they own cell E6 on some digital spreadsheet. If you can't convince that kind of person to invest thousands with a pinky promise to pay a dividend at 11.5% percent that you swear will never go below peg price.... then you're not a good salesman.

Find another cohort with these qualities

1. Easily duped.
2. Have disposable income (or at least some mechanism to get money, how they do it is not your problem)
3. Willing to gamble
4. Desperate to make their money back.

People like Michael Saylor don't need to believe in Bitcoin at all. They believe the people that believe in bitcoin will give them large sums of money. And honestly, they're not exactly wrong (awful people maybe, but not wrong).

I was thinking earlier today about what makes MSTR a viable company at all. They generate next to no income (their software division generates some but it's peanuts compared to their BTC play). They're significantly underwater on their BTC position, a position which has been the main thrust of the company for quite a while now. Yet we hear about them raising all this capital and having large sums of reserve cash. Where does this cash come from?

And that's kinda when it hit me. The value of MSTR to people like Saylor is that it's really good a getting people in crypto to hand them money. How many other companies with no products, that generate 0 in income or revenue and who are billions in debt can raise the kind of capital they can for as long as they have?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Coffeezilla_gg/comments/1t8i6lz/is_mstr_a_scam_ft_coffeezilla/

Not sure how well people remember this being posted barely a month back. A lot of people from the crypto space tried to push it here because they thought that Coffee had been 'owned' in the debate. The financial instrument in question is something called STRC, which has been pushed by MSTR as a super low risk, low volatile financial instrument that is 'like putting money in a money market account' (Michael Saylor's words, not mine). The stable genius that Coffee debates in this video seems to agree with Michael Saylor's outlook.

The way STRC is supposed to work is that MSTR tries to maintain a peg at $100 by either increasing the dividend when the price gets too low or offer new shares if the price gets too high. The problem with this kind of financial instrument is it's very expensive debt that MSTR needs to pay monthly. They are already on the hook for over $1 billion in payments per year. Imagine taking out an 11.5% loan to buy bitcoin and then ranting to someone for an hour on the internet about how it's a genius plan that cannot fail. That's basically what the debate between Coffee and this chungus was.