Listening to This Guy Could Cost You Your Crypto Profits

Crypto’s path forward is concrete – every worthwhile project has a well-thought-out roadmap to bring their token from step A to B to C and to wider and wider adoption. They’re continually working on innovating the technology underlying their project. That’s how we get to hyperadoption and outrageous profit potential.

Personality cults aren’t a part of it. Worshipping a bunch of con artists who hold themselves up as “heroes” or “visionaries” isn’t going to help. Quite the opposite, in fact. Looking at you, Sam Bankman-Fried. Looking at you, Alex Mashinsky.

And I’m looking at you, Michael Saylor – former head honcho of MicroStrategy. Saylor is actually the perfect example of what I’m getting at today.

See, back in 2020, at Saylor’s direction, MicroStrategy started buying Bitcoin – truckloads of it – ostentatiously. A quiescent media held him up as some kind of radical thinker and crypto “visionary.”

But of course, he wasn’t, and a lot of people found out the hard way…

Don’t Confuse Lucky Timing with Savvy

When the crypto bull ran out of steam, Saylor’s betting binge set MicroStrategy’s balance sheet back years. He cost shareholders who trusted him a lot of money with his irresponsible c-suite gambling. People were ruined. It’s a miracle he’s not in leg irons right now – maybe when the Feds are done with Bankman-Fried they’ll get around to Michael Saylor. I hope so.

Because really, Saylor was an ethically bankrupt celebrity crypto bull with okay timing – and zero regard for his duties as CEO. That’s it, the sum total of Saylor’s crypto “qualifications.” And because that was a time of crazy crypto speculation, with cash pouring in from every direction, these speculators – who don’t really understand digital assets at all – would lock on to anyone who seemed smart and enthusiastic about crypto.

“Well, Saylor’s a tech CEO so he must be smart, and he’s all about crypto so I must be doing the right thing. Right?” is a thought that went through tens of millions of worried minds in 2020 and 2021. The problem is that kind of environment – everyone flush with cash and bombed on “hopium” – is fertile ground for crooks, fakers, and con artists.

I have great faith in the future of Bitcoin and crypto, but zero in the future of MicroStrategy. They’re not supporting Bitcoin because they’re committed to technology, innovation, and improving lives, they’re supporting Bitcoin because they’re essentially stuck with it now, and doing anything else would be a disaster.

And again, investors are left holding the bag. If you don’t want to be left holding some crypto-celebrity’s bag, you need to keep this in mind…

Be in Crypto for Yourself and for the Long Haul

Just this past month, Microstrategy disclosed a major sale of Bitcoin, the first one they had made since they got involved with the leading crypto. That’s not to say that they’re bailing out of crypto. They made a major buy around the same time.

But Saylor’s stated reason for the sale says it all: Tax benefits. MicroStrategy chose to scale down their involvement in crypto to boost other aspects of their financial strength.

In this case, the plan was to sell Bitcoin bought previously at a loss so that it could be written off by the company.

The company may have also been buying the dip, but that’s beside the point. The point is that Bitcoin supporters need to remember that these big-name investors or crypto celebrities can’t really be trusted to point the way forward for crypto, or offer recommendations about what to buy, sell, and avoid.

By that same token, you’d be smart to ignore people who tell you to never sell. The idea of HODLing Bitcoin forever is absurd because if you’d never sell it or borrow against it (which is the same as selling for all intents and purposes), you might as well not have it. Selling is when the money actually becomes usable. Buying assets out of an ideological drive to see them do well is contrary to the entire point of the market. The people who make a single asset part of their identity, and start to support it regardless of the financial prospects, are called “bagholders” for a reason: because they get left holding the back when everybody else cashes out.

Bitcoin is the foundation of the crypto asset class, but it isn’t synonymous with it. Don’t join a cult. Don’t worship heroes. I’m not a hero, I’m just somebody who looks closely at the assets to determine which ones have good fundamental value. That’s how we maximize our chances of life-changing wealth.