I remember in 2020, when MicroStrategy, a company specializing in the development of software for business intelligence, data processing and corporate management, began to buy bitcoins with free funds in circulation, everyone did not quite understand it.
We are talking not only about “colleagues on the shop floor”, but also about ordinary people, who initially prophesied the failure of the idea. However, Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy CEO), for some reason, was confident in the chosen vector of the company's development.
A few years later, it became clear that Saylor was right: today the company is the largest public holder of bitcoin - 423,650 BTC, and the average purchase price is only $58,219. Let's take the price of $100,000 per BTC as a benchmark: the company has almost $18 billion in unrealized profits. It is clear that MicroStrategy gets the money to buy bitcoins by issuing convertible bonds, which will have to be repaid in a few years. However, it is also worth considering that the company's shares have risen by 3,600% or 36 times since it adopted the BTC focus.
There have already been cases when MicroStrategy raised funds to buy bitcoins through an additional issue of shares, and as time has shown, it did not affect their value in any way. Michael Saylor stated that starting to buy and store bitcoins was the best idea of his life.
There are a few other companies that have started buying bitcoin in 2023-2024. True, not on such a scale as MicroStrategy does, but still. However, in the fall of 2024, an interesting trend began to emerge: large BTC miners stopped selling the coins they were mining. Instead, they are raising funds through convertible bonds and additional share issues to sustain their business.
Here are a few of the mining companies that have started accumulating BTC:
- Marathon Digital Holdings - 40,435 BTC;
- Riot Platforms, Inc. - 16,728 BTC;
- CleanSpark, Inc. - 9,927 BTC;
- Hut 8 Mining Corp - 9,122 BTC.
The companies have chosen a rather interesting approach for themselves. In fact, fewer and fewer new bitcoins will appear on the market, because large miners stop selling it, so there is less supply and more demand. It's not just physicists who want to buy bitcoin: there are institutional investors, BTC-ETFs, and the government of El Salvador, for example. With the same cryptocurrency ETFs being a huge success and attracting billions of dollars every week, a shortage of bitcoins in the market could happen much faster than first thought.
It is also worth considering the initiative of Donald Trump, who proposed to create a national crypto reserve of the United States in bitcoins. If the bill is approved, other countries will follow the States, which will create an even bigger deficit for the main cryptocurrency and ensure its further growth.
There is one more interesting fact that many people miss: it is estimated that 3 to 4 million BTC have been lost FOREVER. There is no access to them and it is currently impossible to get it. These figures represent about 14-19% of the total bitcoin issuance.
In short, it's not quite clear yet what will be able to stop bitcoin's growth, anytime soon.
