Murray Stahl: Well, all I can say is its Mea culpa. It’s totally on me and I keep saying I’m going to do it and then I just don’t have time to do it. So I just didn’t do it. I’d like to do it and as you can see involved in a lot of stuff. So I just haven’t add, I can only do so much. So I’m doing meetings like this, I’m involved in all sorts of issues that you can read about. I write a lot of research reports, I’m doing a lot of stuff, so I just don’t have time to get to it, but it’s a priority with me. So I’m going to do it at some point and you won’t be disappointed.
Thérèse Byars: Yahoo Finance reported on November 25th, 2022 that in a note to their shareholders, Digital Currency Group, Founder, Barry Silbert attempted to calm investor’s nerves, investor nerves about the financial health of Digital Currency Group’s subsidiaries including Grayscale Investments. My question is, does management have any concerns about the solvency of the Grayscale cryptocurrency funds that FRMO owns? Do you have any concerns over the solvency of Digital Currency Group?
Murray Stahl: Well, we at Grayscale no concerns whatsoever because they’re just funds that own a certain amount of cryptocurrency. In the case of the Bitcoin Investment Trust, it just owns Bitcoin. It’s custody, it’s custody it securely, it’s segregated. I have no concerns whatsoever. In the case of Digital Currency Group, there is some debt, but the debt isn’t owed. I think something like 10 years. This was in the public realm. There were articles, that is owed for 10 years and all you really need to do is take the C on the Bitcoin Investment Trust, multiply by the AUM, you can figure out what the revenue is. So I don’t think there is any problem there, at least none that I can see. So I’m not really worried about. In any event on a cost basis, we don’t have a lot of money in Digital Currency Group.
The issue is what is it worth right now? And there you can get a lot of different numbers. Naturally we want it to be worth as much as possible. I think the current issues as controversial as they are, they’re not going way tomorrow. But I believe they’re in principle solvable and you know, they’ll just have to work through them and solve them. That’s what happens in crypto winter and that’s why, and it’s such a Digital Currency Group, it’s every company in crypto with the exception of us. That’s why I promote myself shamelessly, which may almost, never do a little while ago. Lots of companies threw a lot of capital at something that they ought not have thrown a lot of capital at. And we had the complete different strategy, created a lot of problems for people and they’re not the kind of problems that you can master in a week or a month and they’re quite a few of them.
You just have to work through them I guess. And we had a completely different methodology and we don’t have any issues like that. So that’s the flip side of, when you want to be aggressive, I mean at the time I really shouldn’t blame people. It made a lot of sense. So let me just go into a little detail. Why did it make a lot of sense? Well, two reasons. The first reason is the basic premise of crypto. So it could be argued that, again this isn’t my, this isn’t, what my strategy is. This is not my strategy. I’m just arguing positively rhetorically for somebody else’s strategy to say why did it make sense at a time? Although it didn’t make sense to me. Well, if you believe crypto’s going to outperform the dollar, which I believe that too, then it seems like the next logical steps should be, well then why don’t you borrow money in dollars and you’ll eventually pay back in depreciated dollars relative to your crypto investments.
