The basic situation is that US public equity markets will pay about $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. I don’t know why this is, and I am not especially happy about it, but it’s true. If you have one Bitcoin, you can sell it on a crypto exchange for about $93,000, or you can sell it on a US stock exchange for about $186,000. Therefore, you should sell Bitcoins on the stock exchange, so people do.

The most famous example is MicroStrategy Inc. (now just Strategy), which has built a perpetual motion machine out of buying $1 worth of Bitcoin, seeing its stock go up by $2, and selling more stock to buy more Bitcoin. Because this keeps working, people keep copying it, and I keep talking about them. Originally, this approach was taken by public companies (MicroStrategy and then some imitators): Those companies already had publicly traded stock, so they could pivot to buying Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) and watch their stocks go up.