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Ask HN: Any startups here own Bitcoin (and digital assets)?

5 points by bigbossman ↗ HN
Public companies like Square and MicroStrategy have been in the news for buying bitcoin. Anyone here work for a startup that owns bitcoin on its balance sheet? How does the company custody and track their holdings?

Question is intended for both non-crypto and crypto companies.

15 comments

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derivagral
I don't have an answer, but I do have a question. If you funded some amount of crypto as the primary asset into a new company, and then convinced a SPAC to take you public... is that a net gain? We've seen already-public companies buy up crypto, but what about taking a private one public and skipping the "real" business part?
bigbossman
If that's the case, it's similar to owning any kind of asset, such as cash & equivalents, marketable securities, real estate, etc.
doggosphere
You can be exposed to a bitcoin etf or closed fund as well, there's a bunch now and probably more coming out.

EBIT, BTCC, GBTC, BTCG, QBTC, BITC

Watch out for momentary premiums/discounts on share price though. https://bitbo.io/ for quick calculations.

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superbcarrot
This is one of the worst things a startup can do with their money. I wonder how many will try it just because they want to emulate Tesla.
quickthrower2
Not a great thing for Tesla to do. It’s one step away from Google buying Microsoft stock instead of reinvesting it or buybacks.
tor11
owning digital currencies is not even remotely "one of the worst things a startup can do with their money". it is not an investment. it is not productive. but it is not a bad idea.
throwaway2a02
In other words, it's a gamble. And it has terrible effects on the public image of the company if you ask me. If I was a stockholder, that would make me question the long-term stability of the company, if the executive has tendencies towards such behavior.
dnh44
I'm only half joking when I say this but I think you're neglecting to consider that the Venn diagram of investors/speculators bullish on Tesla and bullish on BTC is a single circle.
randomopining
STX is looking pretty solid. You can stake out for 8-15% APY in 2 week stints for BTC. Would not be bad as a way to store capital.
zachlatta
At Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that helps teenagers run high school hacker clubs, we accept cryptocurrency donations at https://hackclub.com/donate/.

We open source nearly everything we do at https://github.com/hackclub, even our finances. We have deeply appreciated the generosity of the cryptocurrency community.

We have a Coinbase account where we store received crypto. In our books, we log everything in USD and I believe we record our crypto holdings as an asset. This has worked at our current size since we are a small and cash-strapped organization focusing nearly all our efforts on those we serve.