degard / Degard is on Nostr

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Last Notes

2026-08-05 21:28:10 UTC

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Jeff, I saw your interview with knut recently.
What you’re building with Orange Juice is intellectually interesting, but I think there’s an important distinction that’s getting blurred in the narrative.
The core play — acquiring underpriced, cash‑flowing businesses and using their free cash flow plus moderate leverage to accumulate a superior treasury asset — is clever, but it’s also very much in the lineage of the 1980s “raider” or classic PE model: find mispriced cash flows, finance the gap, extract value from the spread. The big difference is that you hold and don’t gut or flip the businesses, which is obviously more founder‑friendly. But structurally it’s still a model of Fiat cash flow → leveraged asset accumulation, with Bitcoin substituted for other treasury assets.
That’s where I struggle with the framing of “moving Main Street onto a Bitcoin standard” or “replacing the fiat economy with a Bitcoin economy.” As described so far, the operating layer of these businesses still lives entirely in fiat: customers pay in fiat, wages and suppliers are paid in fiat, accounting and taxation are fiat. Bitcoin sits at the holding‑company treasury level, not in the day‑to‑day economic circuitry of the business.
In other words, Orange Juice looks like a Bitcoin‑backed holding company, not yet a Bitcoin‑based economy. It turns fiat cash flow into a Bitcoin balance sheet, but it doesn’t (yet) show how pricing, payroll, supplier relationships, credit and everyday transactions move off the fiat rail and onto Bitcoin. That’s the missing piece I’d love to see sketched out: even a concrete roadmap for one acquired business transitioning its operations, not just its treasury, toward Bitcoin.
None of this is meant as a dismissal — permanent capital + real cash flow + a Bitcoin treasury is a meaningful step beyond pure “BTC‑only” listed shells or highly pro‑cyclical debt structures. But if the goal is truly to demonstrate a Bitcoin‑based economy rather than a Bitcoin‑backed balance sheet, I think the burden is still on Orange Juice (and Jeff) to articulate at least a first, real-world blueprint for that operational transformation.

2023-09-10 00:11:52 UTC

Mmh