저자: BillMiller · 외국인
요약 보기
빌 밀러는 개인 순자산의 약 50%를 비트코인 및 관련 암호화폐 투자에 두고 있으며 이 중 상당 부분이 레버리지라고 밝힌다. 비트코인 매입 배경: 2014년 Wences Casares의 강연을 듣고 순자산의 1%를 비트코인에 넣는 것이 합리적이라 판단해 약 200달러대에 처음 매수했다. 이후 여러 차례 추가 매수했으며 2021년 고점 6만6천달러 부근에서는 보유를 늘리지 않고 4주 만에 가격이 절반으로 떨어진 뒤 약 3만 달러 부근에서 다시 매수했다. 비트코인 가치 논리: 비트코인은 '디지털 금'이자 금융 위기·정부 압수에 대비한 보험으로 본다. 공급이 21개로 고정돼 있어 수요가 연 1.5~2% 이상 늘면 가격이 상승한다는 논리를 제시한다. 금 생산 증가 같은 공급 반응이 없다는 점을 근거로 든다. 비트코인 리스크: 과거 세 차례 80% 이상 하락했으며 연평균 170% 상승이라는 수치도 평균일 뿐이라고 인정한다. 거래소에서 50배까지 빌려 쓸 수 있어 레버리지 위험이 크다는 점도 언급한다. 관련 종목: 비트코인 채굴 기업 Stronghold Digital을 펀드와 개인 계좌에서 보유하며 연 6~8달러 수준의 이익 가능성을 제시한다. MicroStrategy도 보유 중이다. 레버리지 구조: 나머지 주식 포트폴리오는 마진 부채를 상환하기 위한 담보 역할을 하며, 아마존 비중이 상당하다. 전망: 비트코인은 장기적으로 인터넷·전기 같은 신기술 경로를 따를 것이라고 보며, 단기 가격 방향에 대한 구체적 목표는 밝히지 않았다.
다듬은 글
But today's conversation is not about Miller Opportunity Trust, it's about his personal portfolio. And here's the headline. Half of Miller's personal net worth is in Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrency investments, and it's leveraged. I asked Miller why he has gone so big on Bitcoin in his personal account.
I'd say it's a combination of of things as it would have to be to allow something to get that big a part of your portfolio because you know, it's it goes against many of the tenets of of financial discipline. Um, on the other hand, the the people that actually are the richest people in the country all are massively concentrated, you know, Buffett and Berkshire, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg.
So, they're not they're not widely diversified. They may be they're they're highly concentrated. And I think that's because they have a high degree of confidence or or have a high degree of confidence in the in the value of those investments. But my my thinking here was that um you know, I I heard a talk on on Bitcoin given by the person who's known as patient zero in the Bitcoin world, Wences Casares.
And um, Wences gave a talk at at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, and he led off his talk, this is 2014, I want to say. Uh, he led off his talk by saying that he asked how many anybody owned Bitcoin, and nobody in the audience owned it except for him. And did anybody know what it was, and a few scattered hands went up.
And he said, "Well, let me explain to you um why I own Bitcoin." And he said, "And it's because I I understand why you wouldn't understand it because you all live in America. And you have a rule of law, and you have uh you know, orderly governments. And in most in most times you have, you know, low relatively low inflation and a prosperous economy." And he said, "But I'm from Argentina.
And my family's been there 150 years. And we've been wiped out four separate times by the Argentinian government seizing our assets, nationalizing the banks, inflating us out with hyperinflation." And he said, "So, Bitcoin can't be touched by the government. It's an it's a peer-to-peer decentralized independent network.
It's a ledger that records every transaction that's public. It's immutable." And he said, "So, the government if you have Bitcoin, the government cannot take it away from you." And he he said, "So, it's it's think of it as an insurance policy." And he went into it and talked a little bit about it, and I thought, you know, and he talked about putting 1% of your liquid net worth in Bitcoin, and I thought that was sensible.
He laid out what it what it could do if it worked. He he said then that it was very risky cuz then it was about $200. But I I I bought some then, and I bought a little bit more over time, and it became $500, and then I stopped buying it. And I didn't buy it for years until just the spring of this year it hit a $66,000 high price.
And then in 4 weeks it was in half. Now, Bitcoin has gone up on average 170% a year for the last 11 years. Now, but that's not every year, it's just an average. It's gone down three different times by more than 80%. So, that's that is, you know, a very volatile and therefore very dangerous if you're especially if you're levered as you can be if you're on some of these exchanges that'll loan you 50 to 1 on on your Bitcoin.
But um each time it's been stopped at around the 80 low 80s level, and it's come back, and this this time I started buying it again at $30,000 down from 66. And my reasoning was is a lot more people using it now. There's a lot more money going into it in the venture capital world. There are a lot of people who are skeptics who are now at least trying it out.
And uh and I thought maybe maybe 50% is a good stopping point for it. But if it goes back down to 80 or 85, I'll buy it all the way down. Well, it did stop right around 50%, and slowly started its way back up again. But I I bought a fair amount at, you know, at the $30,000 range, and have been adding to various Bitcoin-related uh investments since then.
So, uh there's a company that you know, that we own in in our in our income fund called Stronghold Digital, which is a Bitcoin mining company where the CEO owns 35%. It looks like they could make, you know, $6 to $8 in a couple of years, and they're very low-cost miner of Bitcoin. And the all their energy that they're using, the electricity usage is all renewables.
Or or it it gets credits for cleaning up abandoned coal mines. So, it's one of those things that um uh I mean, as much as I like Bitcoin, you know, I've I've added to bought Stronghold in here and own it also via the fund. As well as MicroStrategy and some other companies. So, it's an insurance policy, is that how we should look at it?
I mean, number one, you don't live in Argentina. You do live in a country, you know, with uh with a rule of law, and I'm not sure the dollar is really a stable currency, but it certainly holds its value. Somebody else could, you know, create another Bitcoin. Um, it's you know, it's it's not governed by any rules rule of law.
So, you know, why such confidence in it as an investment aside from the fact that it certainly has worked really well, and more people are kind of jumping on the bandwagon? There's several different several different ways to approach that. Yeah. Um I I would say that that right now it's it's best thought of as digital gold.
So, it's gold is as people have said a store of value for 5,000 years. Right. And gold is what people typically fled to when the governments tried to uh you know, inflate them out. And in the United States, frankly, the Roosevelt confiscated everybody's gold in 1933. You had to turn it in or you went to jail.
So, they can't confiscate your Bitcoin because there's nothing it you hold it securely. As long as you have an internet connection, you can you can uh send it somewhere instantaneously at very low very low cost. And the reason I I the reason I I like the insurance company analogy is because if you think about people talk about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, this is a a Warren Buffett argument, that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.
It doesn't have any earnings. It'll never pay any dividends. Uh and so, so how do you even think about something like that? It it is a new technology. It's something that couldn't be done before. But in any case, the answer that I have to that is, "Well, I mean, what's the what's the intrinsic value of that Mickey Mantle baseball card that sold for five and a half million dollars?
It's just cardboard, and it it doesn't even have a legend. It could be counterfeited very easily. Uh or what's the intrinsic value of a Picasso painting, which is just canvas and paint, uh and uh you know, maybe a frame? But people will pay millions or tens of millions of dollars for it. And it so, it comes down at the very basic level for supply and demand.
So, Bitcoin is the only economic entity where um the supply is unaffected by the demand. So, even with gold, if gold, which is $1,800 today, if gold goes to $18,000, there will be a lot more gold mined because mines that are unprofitable will become profitable. And so, gold, which which accretes today, the production of gold is about equal to about 1 and 1/2 to 2% of the total value per year.
That's the same accretion that Bitcoin has currently. Uh that but this year, 2022, I think we'll drop below 1.5% on that. So, only only 21 million Bitcoin can ever be created or close to it. It doesn't matter if Bitcoin is 100,000 or or 20 million, there's only going to be that many of them. So, um all you have to really believe is that the demand for Bitcoin will grow faster than 1 and 1/2% you know, over the next number of years, and the price inexorably will go up.
So, I've I've I've only recently been allowing myself to be described as a Bitcoin bull. I I used to tell people they said, "Oh, you're a Bitcoin bull. You you own a lot of Bitcoin." I'm like, "I do own a lot of it, but I'm actually a Bitcoin observer. And I'm observing its trajectory as a new technology, and comparing it to the trajectories of things like the printing press, or the steam engine, or the railroads, or the automobile, or electricity.
And and it's following that very uh uh not not predictable cuz it's not predictable certainly in the early days. A well-understood path for the adoption of new technologies. And you know, Stan I think it was Stan Druckenmiller uh said earlier in the year that and now he owns Bitcoin, by the way. Um but he said that Bitcoin was a solution in search of a problem.
And what I've found amusing about that is every new technology is is a solution in in search of a problem. Because you you have a new technology, and you try to figure out what you're going to do with it. And so, you know, when you when we created the internet, what are we going to do with that? So, uh Defense Department had had used good uses for it, but it was tough for other other people to see.
And but now everybody can see what the value of the internet is. Same thing with the internal combustion engine, which was very dangerous and all, but now that's taken over the world, and now we're going to move to to electricity. So, all kinds of technologies have to grow into their uh grow into their potential.
And Bitcoin is I guess you want the theoretical answer to the question is that it's a work of Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute in in Stanford, who is kind of the leading authority on what what he calls increasing returns economics, and what he calls lock-in and path dependence in the economy. So, his basic idea is that when technologies reach a certain dominance, and they're the they're the leader, it's almost impossible to dislodge them even without a very superior technology.
And Bitcoin's there, is that what Uh that's what that's what I would say I and the other bulls believe. Okay. But why the outsized, why 50% of your personal net worth? I mean, I'm I'm assuming that your the other 50% is in like Miller Value Funds, or I don't I don't know how you've diversified and Well, actually actually, close to the other 50% is in Amazon.
All of the rest of the investments that I have are the are are basically there to support margin debt. Cuz I always I'm I'm typically always on margin, which means I can take a lot of volatility. Now, I'm not obviously on uh deadly margin. I'm under using regular reg T margin, and I've got a fair amount of margin capacity.
But the rest of the all the stocks could eliminate all the margin debt and have a fair amount left over, and then I'd have those those if I had to sell all those to pay off the debt, then still have Bitcoin and Amazon. Bill, can you explain to me the concept of Bitcoin as an insurance policy? There's 21 million shares of this insurance company outstanding.
And every day that somebody wakes up and says, "You know, I I need some insurance in case something, you know, in in case the government seizes all the gold like they did back in 1933. Or in you know, when when Afghanistan we pulled out of Afghanistan, um Western Union stopped remittances. So, if you if you couldn't get money, uh and it's still hard to get money in Afghanistan, uh you were in serious trouble.
Uh in Lebanon, the lira has completely collapsed. Venezuela is a failed state. And yet Bitcoin uh continues right along. That was your insurance policy against financial catastrophe of one sort or another. And what did the Fed do when the pandemic shut down all parts of the uh threatened to shut down all parts of the economy, the the financial markets came unglued, and the normal relationships between uh cash and bonds and securities, especially asset-backed securities, got blown apart.
And the Fed had to increase the money supply by 25% to keep those things from collapsing as they did in 2008. Right. During that time, the Bitcoin network functioned perfectly. There was no run on it. There was no prices went down initially until people figured out, "Wait a minute. We've had a tremendous collapse here, and the Bitcoin uh blockchain is functioning without a without a without any interference at all." So, I think that that explains it I think in a way that many people can understand.
If you want a little bit of financial insurance, then buy a Bitcoin or or a part of a Bitcoin. The argument I get most often is, "Why not gold?" Right, which is considered to be an insurance policy against catastrophe historically. the answer to that is, um in my opinion, anyway, uh gold has gone from effect around 5,000 years.
So, it's gone from let's call make up a number and say a dime, a nickel in today's uh parlance. And in 5,000 years, it's gone from a nickel to $1,850. And in 10 years, Bitcoin has gone from a nickel to $57,000. So, why would I own gold? Especially since gold in the last 10 years has gone down. In the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the best-performing asset category in the world.
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