They say dips are for buying, and that’s the approach being taken by one NASDAQ-listed software firm. Its CEO, Michael Saylor, tweeted that MicroStrategy just spent $10 million to acquire 314 additional Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy has purchased approximately 314 bitcoins for $10.0 million in cash in accordance with its Treasury Reserve Policy, at an average price of approximately $31,808 per bitcoin. We now hold approximately 70,784 bitcoins.https://t.co/zMJSH29bmC
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) January 22, 2021
The Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirms this latest purchase. It also details a summary of the company’s aggregate Bitcoin position.
Based on this information, MicroStrategy is currently $1.2 billion in profit, or about +104% ROI.
“As of January 22, 2021, the Company holds approximately 70,784 bitcoins that were acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $1.135 billion and an average purchase price of approximately $16,035 per bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expense.
MicroStrategy has become something of a beacon for institutional Bitcoin adoption. Since September last year, the firm has been buying BTC as an inflationary hedge.
Bitcoin FUD spooks the market
The past 24-hours or so have seen the bears running riot. Huge sell pressure tanked the Bitcoin price to as low as $28.6k. But a bounce at this level in the early hours renewed hopes for recovery.
Observers have blamed the dip on several events that have occurred this week. But perhaps most prominent is the double-spend Bitcoin FUD that has been doing the rounds.
As the name suggests, double-spending refers to a potential issue where two recipients can spend the same funds. This calls into question the validity and security of the blockchain.
It started mid-week when BitMEX Research tweeted the discovery of an apparent small double spend.
“There was a stale Bitcoin block today, at height 666,833. SlushPool has beaten F2Pool in a race. It appears as if a small double spend of around 0.00062063 BTC ($21) was detected.”
Following that, several outlets began fanning the flames of FUD. Descriptors such as “critical flaw” or “dire scenario” did little to help the cause, resulting in a Twitter meltdown.
The double-spend that never was
Since then, further investigations have revealed there was no double-spend. BitMEX Research later tweeted that this was a replace-by-fee (RBF) transaction.
What happened was someone sent 0.00062063 BTC, but had set the lowest fee possible. As the fee was so low, the transaction was taking a long time to confirm. To speed up the process, the sender then tried to front-run the original transaction with an RBF. However, by this time, the network had already confirmed the original transaction.
Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino explained the issue as a momentary blip during chain re-organization. But there was no security flaw as the front-run RBF transaction died with the losing chain.
“In fact, what happened is that two blocks were mined simultaneously. As a consequence, there was a chain reorganization, which did not result in double-spending.”
Taking this into account, the entire issue was completely overblown.
