Bitcoin gains a Baron; A Nasdaq company invests big into Bitcoin; JPMorgan continues to apologize for anti-crypto sentiments by investing more money!

This week is all about big mainstream money going into crypto: famous internet pizza man Dave Portnoy goes all in on Bitcoin, a publicly-traded NASDAQ company bought a couple hundred million dollars worth of BTC, and JPMorgan may be investing $50 million in a very well-known blockchain tech company. More @ Talk.Bitcoin.Tax Full Show Notes: August 14th, 2020: Bitcoin gains a Baron; A Nasdaq company invests big into Bitcoin; JPMorgan continues to apologize for anti-crypto sentiments by investing more money! (00:36) First up, Dave Portnoy has become the self-proclaimed Baron of Bitcoin. For those unfamiliar, Dave Portnoy is the founder of the sports and pop culture blog Barstool Sports. He’s also well-known for his pizza review video channel, One Bite Reviews, and his fairly recent foray into day trading. On Thursday, Portnoy released 10 minute a video of him, Tyler Winklevoss, and Cameron Winklevoss. The video starts with Portnoy talking about how he got into crypto – his followers continuously told him to move from day trading traditional stocks to investing in crypto. From there, via the magic of Twitter, the Winklevoss twins became involved in the effort to convert Portnoy into a crypto connoisseur. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are the founders of the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, and are very vocal about their support for mainstream crypto adoption. Enticing the well-known internet personality known to many as El Presidente was likely a no-brainer and should yield returns for them on both their company and their adoption endeavors. The brothers have attempted to educate and convert other high profile celebrities in the past, including J.K. Rowling and Kanye West. The video consists of the Winklevoss Twins attempting to explain some of the basic tenets of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology. They clarify distinction between mining and buying Bitcoin, and how their crytpcurrency exchange Gemini is similar, in the crypto world, to a stock-trading website like E*Trade. They call Bitcoin “internet gold” and explain how the scarcity affects the value – contesting that real gold’s scarcity can be changed by Elon Musk space mining asteroids, whereas Bitcoin’s scarcity can not be changed, cementing it as the “only fixed asset in the galaxy”. Portnoy semi-jokes about creating his own token, the “Dave Coin”, and muses on the idea of Elon Musk and the Winklevoss twins promoting his coin so that they all become Bitcoin Billionaires. The joke becomes a bit more serious when the brothers offer up some engineers to help code his coin, which leads Portnoy to talk about the coin’s potential success helping the three of them “zoom past the success” of Mark Zuckerberg. After the brief lesson, Portnoy purchases $200,000 worth of Bitcoin and $50,000 worth of the Ethereum-based coin Chainlink (LINK), which has “had a pretty big month or two”. After all is said and done, what does this pretty unique interaction and video mean for cryptocurrency? Well, Dave Portnoy has already consistently been tweeting to his 1.7 million followers to buy BTC since the video’s release – that’s certainly a good thing for overall adoption and increasingly visibility to a mainstream audience. Some are hoping for a “Portnoy Effect” that will push Bitcoin past the $12,000 mark. We’ll have to wait and see if that happens! — (03:14) From $200,000 invested into BTC to $250 million invested in Bitcoin…our next story is about largest independent publicly-traded business intelligence company MicroStrategy. On Tuesday, the company announced via press release that they had purchased 21,454 BTC at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million dollars. According to the release, this purchase was part of a two-pronged capital allocation strategy to invest in “alternate investments or assets” to “maximize long-term value for our shareholders”. The CEO of MicroStrategy stated “This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin, as the