Ammous Says Strategy's 600,000+ BTC Moat Is Too Deep for Treasury Copycats

Saifedean Ammous just said the quiet part out loud. The author of "The Bitcoin Standard" reckons most corporate bitcoin treasuries won't come close to matching Strategy, and his reasoning isn't about belief. It's about scale and cash.

Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, is holding north of 600,000 BTC plus a pile of convertible debt it raised at coupons that still make credit desks blink. That combo gives Michael Saylor a machine rivals can't copy. He issues equity when the market hands him a fat premium to net asset value, converts it into bitcoin, and the flywheel spins again. Everyone else is running the same play with a fraction of the balance sheet.

And that's the problem. The copycat treasuries, Metaplanet, Semler Scientific, Strive, and the dozen or so smaller names that announced buys in the past 18 months, live and die on their premium to NAV. When that premium compresses, issuing shares to stack more BTC stops being accretive and starts being dilution. You're selling equity below what it's worth to buy an asset you already claim to hold. That's not a treasury strategy. That's a slow bleed.

The deeper point from Ammous isn't that these companies go to zero. It's that "bitcoin treasury company" was never a business model. It's a capital markets trade. Strategy got there first, got the index inclusion, got the liquidity, got the debt deals. Ngl, second place in an arbitrage is a rough seat.

Here's my read. Most of these tickers are just Saylor beta with extra steps and worse execution. Want the exposure? Buy BTC. Want the trade? Buy the ones trading below 1x mNAV and hope management knows what they're doing. Anon, let me save you some gas fees. The real alpha is knowing which treasuries can still raise cheap capital, and that list is short.

Watch the mNAV prints. When a treasury company trades under its bitcoin per share, the flywheel stops turning.