But then we’re buying – we’re paying the wholesaler. We’re not paying BITMAIN, so wholesaler responsible for delivering the equipment to us. Some of the confusion might be, one of the things that I wanted to say, one day we’ll have a graph to show this. What I’d like to do, I wish we had a graph for this, maybe next time we can have a graph to show this. So what I’d like to do is show how much money it cost in bitcoin to buy the state-of-the-art machine? So put it this way, when we started mining, let’s say, seven or eight years ago, we wanted to buy the then state-of-the-art machine, which was the S9. If memory serves, we had to, you won’t be paid in dollars. But if we translate those then dollars in the bitcoin, we had to spend roughly nine bitcoin, even though we might have paid in dollars.
We had to spend roughly nine bitcoin to buy the then state-of-the-art, the S9. I think it was something like a 10 or 11 terahash machine. Today, what we want to buy is the S21 coin – the S21 machine, which is 200 tera hash machine. So it’s got processing power probably 20x what the S9 had, and one bitcoin can buy 10.75 of those machines. On the right day, maybe of 11 machines. So what’s happening is the number of machines that you can buy priced in bitcoin is ever rising. So it’s probably my fault. I probably want to say that at some meetings and I didn’t express myself with the precision that I’m doing right now. And maybe it’s totally my fault. People took it as, we’re spending bitcoin to buy machines, but in the past, we’ve done that. We’ve actually – it has happened.
We’ve used bitcoin to buy machines. But recently, we’re using dollars. But what I want to say is whether we’re using dollars or using bitcoin, I really was trying to, in a very articulate way to express the increased purchasing power of coins in relation to machines. And that’s a really important concept because one day, when we have a lot of coins, we’ll be able to grow our processing power if we had to by just using bitcoin from the treasury if we needed to. I don’t expect that to ever happen, but we would have the option of that happening. So I guess what I was trying to express, the idea that sometimes they say to people, you’re not in the fiat world, you’re in the bitcoin world, which is true. So maybe I was trying to express it is if we’re going to do the – we can’t do the accounting of bitcoin because it’s not proper, but mentally, we really should.
So because what’s actually happening, when people look at a quarter bitcoin and they’ll say bitcoin is up or down, whatever it was for a day, but they really shouldn’t say that. What they really should say is the U.S. dollar was down in relation to bitcoin. That’s actually what’s happening. Bitcoin’s not changing in price, U.S. dollars is changing in price. U.S. dollar is losing its purchasing power relative to bitcoin, and you can see it if you had a graph of the machines expressed in bitcoin. And if everybody thought of it that way, people would say, well, my dollar is losing value. I don’t want to have any dollars. I want to have bitcoin, people look at that way. But they look at bitcoin as if it were a stock, there’s not a stock. It may be quoted as if you were a stock, but it’s not a stock.
It’s just an alternative store value, and it’s gaining purchasing power in relation to dollar which is the same thing you’re seeing dollars losing tremendous purchasing power relative to bitcoin. And that’s why we’re involved. It’s a sociological revolution standpoint of view. So I hope I’ve expressed myself more carefully this time. So I made my meaning more clear.
Therese Byars: Moving on to questions about the Horizon Kinetics and Scott’s Liquid Gold merger. As far as you or anyone knows, does Scott’s Liquid Gold, the Scott’s Liquid Gold announcement have any impact on FRMO?
Murray Stahl: Yes, it does because it will happen when this deal closes, I believe, don’t quote me on this. This is my personal belief, so I’m not world’s expert on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. I believe under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, we’re going to have to use the market value of Horizon because we’re going to change the name of Scott’s Liquid Gold to Horizon Kinetics, we have used the market value, whatever that happens to be. And if the market value is higher, then the $15-odd million we have it on the books for, we’re going to have to use the value. I believe it can be required to do that. Time will tell if we really are not being required. So you’re going to see it, it’s going to have an impact and maybe not small on shareholders’ equity. So I would pay attention to that.
Therese Byars: I think you answered these next two questions, which were also about the merger. This shareholder says, I own 11,000 shares of FRMO and my questions for management are what relative details can you share with FRMO shareholders about the decision to bring Horizon Kinetics public through a reverse merger. Why and why not? So FRMO shareholders anticipate any material changes impacting the value of FRMO shares in connection with and subsequent to the merger. If yes, please elaborate. I believe you just did, but if there’s anything you want to add?
Murray Stahl: Yes. I’ll just reiterate that if the value is what the – if you calculate what the value is today and you – there’s a way to do it. If you were to calculate it, my personal view is, I think we’d have to change the balance sheet value of Horizon Kinetics considerably. And maybe, I don’t know for a fact, but maybe that might provoke a discussion of the value of the revenue share, and we may have to change that as well. So there is that part of it. Why did we decide to do it? Well, there’s two kinds of shareholders of Horizon Kinetics. They’re the ones that are active in the business, of which you’re talking to one of them right now. So I’m not going anywhere. I’m not selling any shares. As far as I know I’m in good health.
