BITCOIN VS. MSTR - WHICH ONE IS BETTER?!?

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Good day everyone. My name is Adam Livingston and I am the Bitcoin wizard.

[00:00:03]Today we're going to be talking about Bitcoin versus MSTR. Which one is better? Simply because I get asked this question about 1,000 times per day. So the question that I keep getting asked very simple. Should I hold Bitcoin?

[00:00:15]Should I hold MSTR? Which one is better?

[00:00:18]Now I think that to a lot of people the question sounds smart because it has the cadence of intelligence. But unfortunately, I think that's the question is broken and that is an uncomfortable truth for most because this is in my opinion a category error.

[00:00:33]To me, it's kind of like asking whether the ocean is better than a boat because at the end of the day, we know that we are orange pill. Bitcoin is sovereign digital property. MSTR is something else. Bitcoin is the base layer, the asset itself, the raw digital energy, the raw digital capital, the thing that exists at the bottom of the stack.

[00:00:53]refusing to be debased, refusing to be diluted, refusing to ask permission. You guys are orange pill. You know that.

[00:00:59]Those are the traits of Bitcoin. Good old monetary energy sitting there in its purest form, totally indifferent to anyone's opinions about it. That is the beautiful thing about Bitcoin. That is what we love. But MSTR is something totally different. Obviously, MSTR is a capital markets vehicle. It's a public equity, a machine, a surgically engineered apparatus designed to siphon the fiat liquidity from every single corner of the global financial system and convert it relentlessly into more Bitcoin per share. Two different things entirely. So, a good way to frame it is, hey, if Bitcoin is gravity, MSTR is the rocket that is built to exploit gravity.

[00:01:40]So when someone asks me which one is better, the only honest response is to look them dead in the eye and ask the question that should have been asked in the first place, which is better for what? Because until you answer better for what, you're not even having a conversation, kids. You're just making noise in the general direction of finance. So I'm going to give you my opinion today. This should be a very fun one. I do think that this is a very necessary conversation that we need to have as Bitcoiners because there are these constant purity tests. I'm going to give you my opinion today. But before I do, I really want to take a brief moment to thank Horizon for sponsoring this video. If you guys didn't know, Horizon helps you take your trapped home equity to buy Bitcoin. That's correct.

[00:02:21]Your trapped home equity that's getting eviscerated by inflation into the apex asset known as Bitcoin. You get to retain home ownership. There are no income requirements, no term limits, no monthly payments, none of that nonsense.

[00:02:33]Your traptoome equity into Bitcoin, joinhorizon.com link is in the description below. I will talk more about them at the end of the video. And then in addition to that, if you want to cold store your Bitcoin in the safest way possible to secure your bloodline financial future, the Bitbox O2 Nova Bitcoin only edition is for you. USBC dual chip security architecture, tempered glass display, literally the best Bitcoin wallet known to man. This is what I use to cold store my Bitcoin.

[00:03:01]It's USBC compatible with absolutely everything. This is incredible. My favorite Bitcoin cold storage wallet ever. You can use code Adam BTC for 5% off today. Click the link below in the description and get one for you or a friend or a family member. So, in the Bitcoin discourse, we know that there are a lot of these cold storage maxis out there, the cold storage Puritans.

[00:03:23]Are they philosophically clean?

[00:03:25]Absolutely. I will never argue that. But what I take issue with is when I am labeled a Fiat Maxi because I'm an MSTR investor. I don't think that label makes sense in the slightest. So that's what we're going to get into today. And I'm going to be sharing my opinion because I do believe that these people are half correct, but I also believe that they're half incorrect. So let's get into it.

[00:03:47]The cold storage maxi. Yes, this person is right. Philosophically correct.

[00:03:52]self-custody. Bitcoin is a superior sovereignty instrument. There is no debate about that. No 12-word seed phrase, no multi-IG setup, no metal plate buried in a Wyoming hillside is going to lose to a publicly traded NASDAQ listed equity in a contest of pure distilled monetary dependence. That to me is very obvious. It is also frankly very boring to continue to repeat time and time again. This to me is obvious and this is where I get frustrated because the purist refuses to admit that sovereignty is not the only function that capital serves. It is one function. It might be arguably the most important function to you, but it's not the only one. When we look at humans being these strange biological creatures with mortgages and children and tax obligations and dreams that occasionally extend beyond their own death, humans allocate capital for many reasons. They allocate capital for growth, liquidity, income, speculation, business formation, collateral, asymmetric upside, estate planning or funding the next generation or buying a house so you can live in it or starting a company so you can provide services to people. If you want to hedge a position that you already have. So this philosophy that treats every single unit as if it must serve the exact same purpose. Yes, that's elegant in theory, but it is not pragmatic. And right now in today's day and age, it's absolutely useless in practice. Okay, this is overly philosophical. It's idealistic.

[00:05:34]And I think that this naive idealism just collapses under the weight of reality. It mistakes purity for strategy. It confuses the moral high ground with the tactical high ground.

[00:05:45]And in the actual war for monetary adoption, those are very different hills. So, now it's time to say something that might make some Bitcoiners uncomfortable, but hey, this is just my opinion. Bitcoin adoption is not going to happen because every human being on planet Earth wakes up on a Tuesday morning and then they achieve financial enlightenment over their cup of fair trade coffee and then they decide to become a cold storage monk in a yurt. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this is going to work.

[00:06:13]Adoption is going to happen through very messy human incentives. There is no way around that. It is going to happen through the unglamorous, deeply unsexy plumbing of the existing financial system. And I have only been proven correct because obviously that is what is happening in the age of the ETFs, in the age of the treasury companies, in the age of the banks coming to Bitcoin right now, in the age of the Clarity Act, in the age of legislation. This is just all evidence that this is pragmatic adoption. We're starting to see retirement accounts find their way to Bitcoin exposure because the SEC is now allowing rappers that compliance can approve. So yes, there is this entire grotesque beautiful machine of global capital allocation. The reality is is that capital does not enter the world through philosophical purity. It never has and it never will. Capital always enters through incentives. Think of fee structures for the Bitcoin ETFs. Think of risk adjusted returns through quarterly reports and analyst coverage and institutional mandates and the boring bureaucratic mechanisms by which money actually moves on the planet. And MSTR, let me be very clear about this, it is absolutely undeniably one of the most powerful incentive machines ever built around Bitcoin, if not the most powerful. And I don't view it as a competitor to Bitcoin. It is a Trojan horse. It is a piece of legacy financial infrastructure that got hijacked and then hotwired and then pointed directly at the heart of the fiat system. And I don't view that as a failure of the Bitcoin thesis. I think this is a manifestation of the Bitcoin thesis expressed through a stock ticker. And the genius of strategy and I do not use that word lightly because most things that are called genius are simply confidence with good lighting. The genius of strategy is that it uses the existing financial system against itself. So think about what is actually happening here. equity markets, debt markets, preferred stock, volatility, liquidity, the index flows, the convertible bonds traders, the pension committees, every single one of these tools, all of these tribes, all of these mechanisms designed over the last 100, 150 years to allocate fiat capital. All of them are being quietly, methodically, and somewhat hilariously being repurposed into a single function, which is to buy Bitcoin. Obviously, we saw the dollar get its gold backing removed more than 50 years ago. So, we have seen during this time this fiat system building this machine, this exquisitely complicated machine for allocating capital between humans. Now, regardless of what you think of its philosophical merits here, it is undeniable that it is the most sophisticated financial apparatus in human history. It moves trillions of dollars a day. It has its own priesthood, its own scriptures, its own elaborate rituals performed in glass towers in Manhattan. And Sailor was the first person with enough conviction in the asset of Bitcoin itself to walk up to the machine, take a long look at it, and say, "Hey, fine. I will use this to buy Bitcoin." That is the most prime example of pragmatic adoption. This is the speculative attack that the cipher punks talked about 30 years ago. Only it's not being executed by some shadowy figure in a hooded sweatshirt. So people are losing their minds. It's being executed in broad daylight in SEC filings and earnings calls in 10ks with full transparency while the people being attacked applaud politely and ask follow-up questions about the capital structure. This is always going to be the way that Bitcoin was going to go.

[00:09:58]It's going to go from being an ideological asset held by a few thousand enthusiasts to becoming an institutional gravity well that pulls every other form of capital toward it. You don't have to participate in that, but you should at least have the intellectual honesty to recognize what it is. So you see the purists just make this fatal mistake.

[00:10:18]They confuse custody with capital allocation. These are not the same thing and these are not in the same conversation. Cold storage answers this.

[00:10:27]How do I protect my property from seizure or delilution or debasement? You know, the slow grinding teeth of fiat decay. We know that Bitcoin answers that perfectly. There is zero debate there. I buy Bitcoin every single day because I want to have an exact answer to that question. But if we look at human incentives, we must recognize that obviously people want to protect their purchasing power. That is a huge incentive for why a lot of people buy Bitcoin. And this is just reality. I'm sorry if this is going to make people mad, but since sailor began the Bitcoin Treasury Strategy, MSTR has done a better job of protecting your purchasing power than Bitcoin has if you held throughout the entire time. This is undeniable. And you can know this by not pricing MSTR in fiat, but by living on a Bitcoin standard and pricing MSTR in Bitcoin. That's why I don't like the fiat maxi argument because if you want to live on a Bitcoin standard, you can price things in Bitcoin. To me, Bitcoin is the least risky asset to hold.

[00:11:30]Therefore, there is a place for risk capital. If you price MSTR in Bitcoin, you would have ended up with more Bitcoin. It protected your purchasing power better. A lot of the detractors will confuse the concept of equity with fiat currency, which are not even close to the same thing. Are these people actually going to make the argument that the concept of equity will totally disappeared in this bitcoinized world where bitcoin is used as money? So when we talk about capital allocation, these are different questions. They live on different planets. They have different time horizons, different risk profiles, different roles in a portfolio and different reasons for existing. So we have these purists trying to judge these both instruments by the same standard and I think that's very intellectually lazy. Now obviously am I saying that they both have the same risk profile?

[00:12:18]Absolutely not. With MSTR you are being compensated for taking on that additional counterparty risk. But that brings me to my next point. Risk does not make something irrational. Let's talk about the anti-STR argument as it actually exists in the wild. Totally stripped of all the rhetoric. The argument when it boils down to it usually looks like this. MSTR has risk therefore coiners should reject it. And this is, I'm sorry to say, very childish reasoning. And this is why every serious capital allocation decision involves risk. Yes, every single one. Holding cash we know is risk. Holding Bitcoin has risk. Holding gold has risk. There is zero argument about this. If you actually disagree with me, I'm sorry.

[00:13:03]You're not living in reality. To me, in my opinion, is Bitcoin and cold storage the least risky asset? Yes, in my humble opinion. But no matter what you do with your finite life energy transmuted into value, economic value that you can retain, there is no escaping risk. Risk as a concept is omnipresent, holding nothing at all and stuffing your money into a mattress that has risk. Your mattress can catch fire. The reality is is that risk is not binary that you can opt out of by being ideologically pure.

[00:13:36]If you think that that's possible, you should look up the news story where this guy lost his Bitcoin cold storage wallet in a landfill and he's been searching for it forever. You cannot look at me and tell me with a straight face that there is zero risk with self-custody Bitcoin. There are absolutely horror stories of people losing access to their Bitcoin because humans are fallible creatures. Risk is the medium through which all of financial life occurs.

[00:14:01]Okay. The relevant question is never is there risk. The relevant question is always is the risk compensated? If MSTR through its mechanism of this accretive bitcoin per share equity issuance, whether it's the common stock, whether it's convertible bonds being issued, whether it's the issuance of preferred stock, can they increase Bitcoin per share? They have shown that they've been able to. Is this guaranteed? Absolutely not. There are no guarantees in life.

[00:14:29]This is a disclosed risk trade. So, you don't buy MSTR because it is safer than cold storage. Of course, it isn't. That is a ridiculous comparison. You buy MSTR because it may, depending on execution and market conditions, no guarantees that it could outperform every other risk asset on Earth when priced against the Bitcoin hurdle rate. the Bitcoin hurdle rate is the only benchmark to me that matters in a world of monetary debasement. Because you guys know as well as me that outperforming the S&P 500 is totally meaningless if the S&P is being measured in a unit that loses purchasing power every single year.

[00:15:11]Outperforming gold has historically been a low bar because it can be flat for decades. I think that outperforming real estate is a low bar. To me, a Bitcoin standard. The only benchmark worth a damn anymore is Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. And the question that MSTR is posing with full transparency and no apology is, can a publicly traded equity using every tool available in the modern capital markets, accumulate more Bitcoin per share at a rate that beats simply holding spot? And if the answer is yes and the historical evidence is increasingly difficult to argue against then the entire conversation just has to change. It stops being about ideology and starts to be about something called math. And that is the entire point. So now that we have established that even if you price things in Bitcoin MSTR can be means to get more Bitcoin for you than just holding Bitcoin. That is reality. It's just the math. This is the mechanism.

[00:16:10]Let's say if you take $180 right now and then you buy Bitcoin, you never touch your wallet. What happens? You acquire X amount of Bitcoin. That amount of Bitcoin exposure will never change unless you know you add or subtract from it with other transactions. You are accumulating that level of Bitcoin. But with MSTR, by taking on additional risk, the management team can increase your Bitcoin per share over time. So, you take that same $180, you'd buy that one MSTR share. And their goal is to double your Bitcoin per share in 7 years. They just mentioned that on their last earnings call. Now, the question is, can they do that? To me, I think they can.

[00:16:47]Are you accepting more risk? Absolutely you are. But because of the leverage, the outstanding preferred stock, they have a 33% amplification ratio on the balance sheet. And then if they double your Bitcoin per share every single seven years and the multiple rerates to a 1.5x and then you compare that to Bitcoin just going up 20%. These are the results of the math. They're pretty striking. Remember Bitcoin had that 20% kagger after 14 years that gets you close to a 13x at a 12.84x return. But with the amplified move on Bitcoin with additional Bitcoin per share and with the potential expansion in the MNAV, MSTR can greatly outperform Bitcoin and dollars and Bitcoin, whatever your measuring stick is, and that protects your purchasing power more for the additional risk that you undertake. A 75x in MSTR versus a 12.8X in Bitcoin.

[00:17:38]That is just what the math tells you.

[00:17:39]Now, the question is, can the management team execute? I don't know. That's up for you to decide. But burying your head in the sand and expecting the world to just be one libertarian fantasy land one day where everybody just sits on their cold storage Bitcoin, they don't use it for commerce or for investing in equities that is just delusional. And the reason why is because people want to protect their purchasing power. So it's very hard to ignore an opportunity like this. So I want to close on something that I'm going to refer to as salient pragmatism. And I want to talk about this because humans live inside of capital markets right now. They live inside of tax systems. We live inside our retirement accounts, our brokerage platforms, our IAS, 401ks. Yes, do you need to take part in these things?

[00:18:22]Absolutely you don't. But right now, it is undeniable that lots of humans are living inside of these incentive structures that they did not choose and they cannot simply walk away from. The cold storage monk though, they pretend that none of these exist. They pretend that every dollar of capital is fungeible with every other dollar and that all of it can be marched single file into a cold storage hardware wallet. It cannot. And that is not how the world is structured. That is not how human economic life is organized. And there is no rational path forward where that's going to be reality in the next 10 to 20 to 50 years in my humble opinion. So you can be principled all you want, but in my opinion, it just makes you more ineffective. It makes you a person who is correct in theory and absent in practice. The future of Bitcoin is going to be built by people who understand with cold and clear eyes that Bitcoin absorbs the world through every available channel to it. And we are just seeing that through the ETFs, the corporate treasuries, public equities, the credit markets now, preferred stock, pension allocations, sovereign wealth funds through every single crack and seam in the legacy financial system. It's water finding its level and gravity doing the quiet work.

[00:19:32]Here I have identified four principles that is pragmatic Bitcoinization. Number one, I hold Bitcoin for sovereignty.

[00:19:39]Self-custody is the ultimate ideal. To me, it's non-negotiable for my core position. And then number two, I deploy the capital that I want to risk to only beat the Bitcoin hurdle rate because I'm living on a Bitcoin standard and I'm pricing everything in Bitcoin. That leads me to my number three thing, pricing everything in SATs. And then number four, I'm going to continue to let adoption flow through incentives.

[00:20:02]I'm not expecting every single human being to read Ludwig von Misus. My 84year-old grandpa who wants to live the high life in retirement would rather buy STRC than dive into some libertarian literature. To me, Bitcoin is the destination. MSTR is one of the vehicles. So, for the love of God, stop arguing about whether the vehicle is the destination. And maybe for God's sake, stop letting purity theater cost you some satoshi's. Thank you. Decide your own risk tolerance, but don't act that other human individuals are lesser than you because they differ from you philosophically. My name is Adam Livingston. I am the Bitcoin Wizard.

[00:20:40]Thank you for joining me on this journey of pragmatic Bitcoin adoption. If you enjoyed the content, please like this video and subscribe to my channel where I bring the orange gospel of Bitcoin to the masses on the daily. Have a terrific day everybody. Do not party too hard.

[00:20:53]Class dismissed. We all want to own more Bitcoin, but most of us aren't sitting on piles of idle cash. And that is where Horizon comes in. Horizon lets homeowners convert a portion of their home equity into Bitcoin, so they can diversify into an asset with stronger long-term growth potential. What makes Horizon stand out is its flexibility.

[00:21:15]There are no monthly payments, no interest charges, and no fixedterm limit. You stay in your home. You stay in control. And the coin that you buy is fully yours to hold in custody however you choose. That means no margin calls, no forced selling, and no scenario where Bitcoin volatility puts your home at risk. If you believe that Bitcoin will outperform your home's growth over the long term, Horizon gives you a way to act on it using capital that you already have. Horizon has already helped hundreds of homeowners put their equity to work in Bitcoin, and they'd love to help you as well. Visit joinh horizon.com using this QR code or at the link in the video description. You can see how it works and estimate how much Bitcoin you could unlock in just 90 seconds. Transform your home equity into Bitcoin today with Horizon.