Why MSTR Will Underperform Bitcoin | Parker Lewis

**Parker Lewis** (0:02)
People come to understand Bitcoin in a myriad of different ways. A lot of people have touched the hot stove. Bitcoin treasury companies are not, you know, in general the equivalent of alt season and alt coins. But there's a very similar lesson that I think is going to have to be learned, which is that it's a great way to get less Bitcoin. If all else is equal to you, you know, and it's like, oh, well, you could either go buy Bitcoin at this company X, Y, or Z, or buy the ETF.
You are incentivized to get them to also buy your stock. And that's where I see the greatest misalignment because it's predicated on, you know, constantly raising more and more capital, and most of which should be people just buying Bitcoin directly. The sentiment has never been worse for my 10 years around Bitcoin. The fundamentals of Bitcoin have never been better. Yeah, and those two things are true at the same time. And I think that there's also, you know, in my view, there also never was an adoption wave since 2021, and that the next one will be particularly large because of that.

**Danny Knowles** (1:00)
I mean, we've started now. I was just having a chat, but we may as well just make this the show.
Like the adoption wave, like new people come into Bitcoin when Bitcoin is ripping. Like they come in in the euphoria phase of Bitcoin price. Like that happens every single cycle. And I think because we didn't have that, we never got the kind of broader awareness. You didn't see it posted in all the major news articles and things like that. I just think we never got that influx of retail because of AI, because everyone was going to AI. And if people were coming to Bitcoin, they were probably going to the treasury companies.

**Parker Lewis** (1:32)
Yeah. I think that's just from my own vantage point of being at meetups, being at conferences. Of course, people are trickling in here, there in terms of new people, but there was not a decided wave. There was in 2017 or 2020, 2021
And why that is, I don't know if it was just that the price increase was a function of the ETF, and a lot of low conviction, small institutional flows, rather than an unlock of a wave of new people actually figuring out that there was signal on Bitcoin. And then with the kind of everything happening in AI, sucking both capital out as well as mind share. She's like, yeah, eventually they're going to print a shit ton of money, and people are going to figure out that the Bitcoin is right, and the Bitcoiners will figure out that that was the North Star and get back to the basics.

**Danny Knowles** (2:33)
Yeah, I don't think retail has gone forever. But on the treasury company stuff, you've been fighting a lot online. I've loved to see it, to be honest.
Do you think the treasury companies have been a net good for Bitcoin?

**Parker Lewis** (2:45)
Danny, everything's good for Bitcoin.

**Danny Knowles** (2:48)
Is it, though?

**Parker Lewis** (2:49)
In the sense that I think that Bitcoin has to humble everybody, and that people come to understand Bitcoin in a myriad of different ways. A lot of people have to touch the hot stove.
Bitcoin treasury companies are not, in general, the equivalent of alt season and alt coins. But there's a very similar lesson that I think is going to have to be learned, which is that it's a great way to get less Bitcoin. And maybe a few people were the minority or exception, that created this idea that the market as a whole could, and that the market as a whole learns that they can't, and that markets might be efficient over short periods of time, but as a function of time, it becomes more efficient and people learn from their past mistakes. And that the people that learned that mistake, that they actually got less Bitcoin by buying a Bitcoin treasury company at a large premium to make the actual Bitcoin at hell was why they ultimately got less Bitcoin and they will come to understand it and not make the same mistake twice.
And so I don't think that it's brought in this large amount of net new adoption that a lot of other people seem to think it has. So I think it's been a lot more neutral to negative potentially on price, but it is what it is and the market has to process information. And I think the market is in, part of what might get us out of this cycle is a bunch of people actually finding the real signal and rotating out of the treasury companies and buying Bitcoin.