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The potential downside on this is 100%. The potential upside on this is... Unknowable.

They would never get away with this as a publicly traded company.

Why would they not? This is effectively buying Bitcoin, slowly, at a discount (they'll surely slap hefty fees/unfavorable exchange rates on it, because there are many people who will happily pay extra for the privilege of paying with crypto, just like people will pay a lot more for anything slapped with an "organic" label).

Tesla, a publicly traded company, got away with buying $1.5 billion in Bitcoin just fine.

PayPal can also sell that Bitcoin to customers who want to buy Bitcoin.

Tesla is not a payment processor. Nor is it in the business of profiting off of crypto as a fundamental change in it's business model.

I'm replying to a comment saying they should use their cash reserve to buy bitcoin instead of dividends/buybacks.

And yes, they can sell it and have some level of "float" to support crypto buy/sell exchange. But the comment was a hodl comment to "make them more money."

See Microstrategy... speculative attack on fiat.

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