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]
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.
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.
The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.
I’m visiting some family and I’m a hero for fixing a couple devices that stopped working from alkaline batteries by using a bit of foil paper to overcome the corroded contacts.
Maybe not great in the long run (steel and aluminum don’t like eachother)… maybe I should have put on some grease…
I swab the corroded contacts with white vinegar from the kitchen. It turns the white gunk into a foamy blob, and I assume it etches off enough of the corrosion to restore conductivity. I wipe the foamy part with the dry side of the cotton swab, and the device usually works again.
I started doing this as a kid, reasoning that the white gunk looked like baking soda, which is fun to combine with vinegar, so let's see what happens. I just looked it up, and it appears that the process is legitimate and safe. The vinegar turns potassium carbonate into potassium acetate, also producing carbon dioxide.
That is step one. However that is rarely enough: the corrosion eats through the chrome plating on the steel (chrome is a good conductor, steel makes a great spring), and that rusty steel is a poor conductor. Even if you polish the steel, it will rust again soon. (chrome plating requires nasty chemicals, not something to attempt at home - I suspect you could silver plate at home for cheap enough but I haven't tried it)
In chunks like that, with such little metal total? Nothing. Even if you sabotaged it to heat indefinitely the plastic around it would burn and leave the aluminum unreacted.
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]
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