Strategy, the company that used to be called MicroStrategy, sold bitcoin last week.

It sold 1,638 coins for $104.7 million between July 27 and August 2, at an average price of $63,957. Roughly half the money went to pay dividends on its preferred stock. The rest went to buying that stock back.

That is a small sale. The company still holds 842,138 bitcoin, so what left the pile is about two tenths of one percent of it. What makes it worth your morning is the reason.

The steady thing underneath bitcoin all this time has been a company that buys and does not sell. Michael Saylor built a public identity on it. As recently as this summer he was still telling the market to expect his company to be a net buyer.

That story has been load-bearing. If you have held bitcoin through this year, some part of your confidence has rested on the idea that there is a large buyer out there who does not care much what the price is, quietly taking supply off the market on the way down.

The filings read differently. Between May 26 and July 26, Strategy added 37 coins. Then it sold 1,638 of them in seven days. On the reporting, the company now owns less bitcoin than it did in the spring.

Preferred stock is a promise to pay a fixed amount of cash, on a schedule, more or less forever. Strategy issued a great deal of it to buy bitcoin with. The dividend comes due whether or not the price has been kind.

This is a real obligation to real investors who bought a security that promises them cash. It sits ahead of the ordinary shareholders in the queue and it has no opinion at all about the bitcoin thesis.

A treasury made of bitcoin cannot pay a cash bill without selling bitcoin.

Every other big corporate treasury in history has held things that produced something. Cash produced interest. Property produced rent. This one produces nothing, by design, and that design is the entire appeal right up until a bill arrives.

So the question worth asking is what a bill like that does to a balance sheet in a year when the price does not go up.