Matt Levine, Columnist

Bitcoin Dividends and Marxist Indexing

Also shareholder rights, Goldman millennials, Venezuela, and the battle to defeat death.

October 25, 2017 at 1:29 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Does bitcoin pay dividends?

The way dividends work is, you own shares of a company, and the board of directors of the company meets, and they decide to pay a dividend, and then they mail you some cash as a dividend on your shares. This is the way spin-offs work too: The board meets, they decide to do a spin-off, and they mail you some shares of a new company as a dividend on your shares of the old one. All of these mechanics work because the company is a thing, and it has collective decision-making processes, so you can say things like "the company decides to pay a dividend" or "the company spun off its widgets division" or "the company mailed me a check" or whatever.