Michael Saylor's Bitcoin Acquisition Strategy Sparks Debate on Market Impact

According to Cointelegraph, Michael Saylor's approach to Bitcoin (BTC) acquisition is likened to "synthetically halving Bitcoin" by purchasing a significant portion of the newly minted supply from miners each month. This strategy, as explained by BTC analyst and author Adam Livingston, involves acquiring more than half of the monthly Bitcoin production, which currently stands at approximately 13,500 BTC. Over the past six months, Saylor's firm has acquired 379,800 BTC, averaging around 2,087 BTC per day, surpassing the daily output of miners. Livingston suggests that as Bitcoin becomes scarcer, access to it will demand a premium, and borrowing against Bitcoin will become a luxury reserved for nation-states and large corporations. He further predicts that Strategy will control the bottleneck, influencing BTC's global cost of capital, which will no longer be determined by the market but by Strategy's policies. This anticipated supply crunch could lead to significantly higher BTC prices if the firm maintains its acquisition pace amid growing demand from institutional and retail investors. The Bitcoin miner reserve, which tracks the total BTC held in miner wallets, continues to decline, indicating a shift in holdings towards institutions like Strategy. Cypherpunk and Blockstream CEO Adam Back has predicted that Strategy and similar institutions adopting a Bitcoin corporate treasury plan could propel BTC's market capitalization to $200 trillion. Back describes these companies as exploiting the gap between Bitcoin's future potential and the current fiat system. However, critics caution that Strategy's debt-based BTC acquisition approach could pose financial risks if a prolonged bear market occurs. They also warn of systemic risks due to the high concentration of Bitcoin held by a single entity. Despite these concerns, Bitcoin advocate and author Saifedean Ammous argues that Strategy's concentration of BTC does not threaten the protocol. Ammous believes that institutions like BlackRock and Strategy cannot engineer a hard fork to increase Bitcoin's maximum supply, as it would devalue their holdings, ultimately affecting shareholders who have the power to divest.