[Scoundreller]

That’s the mark-to-market change, no?

Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall.

Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done.

From Wikipedia:

> In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]

[rwmj]

You have to compare it to what else they could have done with the money, such as investing in their own growth, or even giving it back to shareholders if they had no good ideas what to do with the money.

[Scoundreller]

I did! If they invested it in themselves it would have been a 50-75% loss, same with doing a buyback (return the cash to stockholders) at a high stock price.

Dunno what better proxy I could use for how it would have went other than their actual stock price. Unless we are to think their next best idea that they didn’t invest in would have done better than all the other things they did invest in. But that’s very speculative.

Instead they got a blended 300% gain on btc.

Should have sold the entire company for cash and bought bitcoin at the timelines they did.