Judge Hardcase

Judge Hardcase's avatar
Judge Hardcase
npub1k7v6...7ehv
In case you missed it, within the last week, Strategy diluted MSTR by another ~$750m worth of shares so that they could buy more... well, nothing... they just kept the dollars - and increased their dollar reserve by another ~50%. That being said, I get why they're doing it: so that they can give credibility to their recently stated intention to continue to pay preferred stock dividends well into the future almost no matter what. Here's the kicker: The vast majority of their past few issuances of preferred stock has been in STRD. At current prices, they could raise ~38% more capital by instead issuing the same quantity of STRF shares. They come with the same dividend obligation - except that STRD comes with the option for Strategy to choose to just not ever pay any particular dividend. So, to me, by raising less capital to issue STRD than they would by issuing STRF, this signals that when Strategy says they're stock-piling dollars to ensure they can continue to pay dividends long into the future, that doesn't necessarily apply to STRD dividends (because if it did, they'd clearly be better off by just issuing STRF instead).
Pretty good discussion by @Bitcoin Mechanic; but, I have a slightly different take. It seems to me it is potentially even more damaging to privacy software development to necessarily conflate that with the Samourai case at all. Rationalize their reasons for pleading guilty all you want, the bottom line is they pleaded guilty (admitted to the court) to more than just writing software. Did the prosecution actually have any evidence of this? Were they coerced? Unfortunately, because of the guilty pleas - thus, removing the onus on the prosecution to even present its case to the court, the public will never know for sure what we don't know. I have no problem with those who advocate for their release. But, trying to scare an entire privacy software development community into thinking that they'll be next unless Samourai are released is just not productive, IMO.