Author: Nancy, PANews
In the post-PC era, Dell has become popular again with its AI story. Now, Michael Dell, the helmsman of this old PC giant, seems to have turned his attention back to the encryption field after adopting Bitcoin in the early stage.
A few days ago, Michael Dell posted a message saying "Scarcity creates value". This tweet attracted the attention of Michael Saylor, the founder of "Bitcoin bull" MicroStrategy, who replied that "Bitcoin represents digital scarcity". Michael Dell then retweeted Saylor's reply and attached a picture of Cookie Monster eating Bitcoin cookies.
Not only that, Michael Dell also launched a community vote on "What do you think is the next major breakthrough in technology?" The options include quantum computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain and space technology, among which blockchain has the highest voting rate, exceeding AI.
As one of the world's richest technology tycoons, Michael Dell has a net worth of $120 billion. His every move brings traffic and topics. His attention to Bitcoin immediately aroused speculation from the outside world, especially when there are many billionaires in the world who hold Bitcoin.
In fact, more than 10 years ago, Dell, Microsoft, PayPal and other giants were early adopters of Bitcoin and were among the e-commerce companies that accepted Bitcoin payments in the world. In July 2014, Dell, which had annual sales of nearly $60 billion at the time, issued an announcement shortly after repeatedly warning about Bitcoin malware, announcing that it would cooperate with Coinbase to accept Bitcoin as a payment method, and in order to encourage more people to use Bitcoin payments, Dell also launched a 10% discount campaign. In the announcement, Dell not only introduced Bitcoin's advantages such as "effectively reducing payment processing costs" and "easy to do anywhere", but also emphasized that it can make direct Bitcoin payments. Users only need to select Bitcoin payment when submitting an order and then jump to Coinbase, and pay through the platform account or Bitcoin wallet. The entire payment process is similar to today's Alipay, and at that time, indirect purchases of goods through Bitcoin gift cards such as Gyft, eGifter and iTradeBTC were the mainstream choice.
The announcement also quoted a relevant report from Coindesk in response to the question of "whether Dell has accepted Bitcoin." "Although Dell is not an enthusiast-level brand, it does provide a series of interesting products for different users, such as large-size high-end monitors for designers and Alienware laptops and computer equipment for gamers." Providing consumers with more flexible payment options may be the key for Dell to keep up with the times and support Bitcoin.
Less than a month after the launch of this feature, Dell received payment orders for more than 85 bitcoins (worth about $50,000 at the time), and later expanded the business to the UK and Canada. Three months later, Dell also became a data center supplier for Bitcoin mining, reaching an agreement with a Bitcoin ASIC provider in Seattle on server hosting, using some of its server hosts for Bitcoin mining. Dell's chief information officer Paul Walsh also said that Dell is familiar with Bitcoin mining.
However, due to low market demand, Dell also announced in October 2017 that it would stop accepting Bitcoin payments. Since then, Michael Dell has rarely mentioned Bitcoin publicly. In an interview with the New York Times in 2021, he said that he did not know the value of Bitcoin, but that the blockchain might have been undervalued. When asked whether Bitcoin was overvalued or undervalued, Dell replied, "I don't know."
It is worth noting that according to Dell's latest financial report, its current assets on its balance sheet amounted to US$34.5 billion, including US$5.89 billion in cash and cash equivalents, but it does not publicly hold any Bitcoin.
However, Dell often appears in the field of encryption. For example, in 2019, Dell jointly launched the data privacy project Alvarium with IOTA and Linux; in February 2023, Dell joined the Hedera Governance Committee and will develop applications for highly decentralized mission-critical environments such as edge computing on the Hedera network by running its own Hedera nodes; in January 2024, the decentralized cloud service OORT joined Dell's global customer loyalty program to provide Dell's global customers with unique decentralized data storage services. In addition, Dell and Michael Dell's investment institutions have also participated in the investment of encryption projects. For example, in March 2022, Fanatics, a sports merchandise giant that provides services such as NFT markets, announced that it had completed a $1.5 billion financing with MSD Capital LP and others at a valuation of $27 billion; in May 2024, the distributed GPU cloud computing service RunPod announced that Dell Technologies Capital led its $20 million seed round of financing.
Although Dell and Michael Dell have not yet publicly entered the crypto field in a big way, their high-profile statements also highlight the increasing mainstream attention surrounding Bitcoin, and their public optimism about Bitcoin may also imply that they are already quietly allocating crypto assets.
