When coffee shops buy Bitcoin, things get frothy

ECONOMIST CARLOTA PEREZ once described the peak frenzy of boom-and-bust investing cycles as the moment when capital gains are copy and pasted, with financiers indulging in "the intense repetition of the same successful recipe"—from building canals to launching dot-com start-ups. It rarely ends well.

- Bloomberg

Perez was writing over 20 years ago, but it's easy to see the similarities with the latest froth on financial markets: companies that tap capital markets for cash, use that cash to buy cryptocurrency, watch their shares rise and do the whole thing again. What began with Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy Inc. (now just "Strategy"), a software company valued at more than 200 times revenue because of the 597,625 Bitcoin ($64.8 billion) it owns, has now gone viral as hundreds of new and existing businesses build their own cryptocurrency stash. It probably won't end well either.