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Bitcoin, Strategy, and the Manufactured Illusion of Wealth

by Ram ben Ze'ev



Bitcoin, Strategy, and the Manufactured Illusion of Wealth
Bitcoin, Strategy, and the Manufactured Illusion of Wealth

Retail investors are once again being swept into the tide of Bitcoin euphoria—this time fuelled not by anonymous influencers, but by the relentless promotional machine of Strategy ($MSTR) and its frontman, Michael Saylor. His latest announcement proudly declares the acquisition of another 10,624 BTC at an astonishing price of more than $90,000 per coin, framing it as yet another milestone in the company’s “Bitcoin strategy.” But beneath the triumphant language lies a stark and unspoken truth: these purchases are not assets—they are liabilities.


Strategy is not creating value. It is accumulating debt to buy a digital abstraction whose price swings wildly and whose worth is determined by little more than market sentiment. When a company issues new debt or converts obligations into Bitcoin holdings, that is not profit, growth, or yield. It is leverage. It is exposure. It is risk piled upon risk.



Yet Saylor presents each new purchase as though it were the forging of a monetary empire, deliberately using vocabulary designed to blur the line between accounting reality and marketing fiction. He speaks of “BTC Yield,” a term that implies financial return but merely reflects the increase in the number of coins the company holds—an increase often financed by borrowing or issuing dilutive instruments. In traditional finance, this would be called inventory expansion. In Bitcoin circles, it is repackaged as victory.


To retail investors, the implication is clear: if a publicly traded company continues buying Bitcoin at record highs, surely the asset is sound and the strategy proven. But this belief is manufactured. Strategy’s balance sheet is exposed to the most volatile, unregulated, and sentiment-driven asset of the modern era. Each new purchase raises the company’s average cost basis and increases its dependency on Bitcoin’s future price continuing upward—forever.


This is not financial prudence. It is a speculative pyramid built on debt-funded optimism.


Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, no earnings, no revenue streams, and no physical form. It is a digital entry on a decentralised ledger, whose “price” has already erased billions of dollars of real human wealth during its collapses. Each crash leaves retail investors devastated, while institutional promoters emerge unscathed, ready to begin the next cycle. And still, the same narratives return: “digital gold,” “monetary revolution,” “store of value.” None of these slogans have prevented the catastrophic losses suffered repeatedly by ordinary investors who believed the hype.



Strategy’s purchases do not stabilise the market—they distort it. They create the illusion of institutional confidence while increasing the company’s own financial fragility. If the price falters, the liability remains. The debt remains. The obligations remain. Only the illusion evaporates.


Retail investors must see through this. Bitcoin is not designed to protect the average household. It has repeatedly destroyed the savings of millions. Its volatility is not strength; it is the direct consequence of an asset with no foundation in economic reality.


Michael Saylor may continue to frame every new purchase as an act of strategic brilliance, but the mathematics are unmistakable: a leveraged company increasing its exposure to a non-productive, highly speculative asset is not generating yield—it is assuming risk. And that risk will not fall on Saylor or on Strategy’s institutional partners. It will fall, once again, on the retail public drawn in by carefully crafted hype.


Until people recognise that Bitcoin’s supposed growth is sustained by narrative rather than substance, the cycle of excitement and devastation will continue—leaving ordinary investors to pay the price for a digital illusion that never truly existed.



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