For some reason they want their American daddy to pat Bitcoin on the head by granting one.
Ive already commented on this news in another topic, and I agree that any BTC ETF will go pretty unnoticed other than the one approved by the SEC in the US. But again even if that happens I don't know if there will be a difference in what an ETF is in its nature - a physical-backed bitcoin ETF that involves the physical purchase of BTC or one that is based on futures...
As far as I know, most experts believe that such an ETF would literally launch a price into the sky - but that the long-term consequences would not be good for Bitcoin. It is interesting to read what our admin thinks about it :
theymos
7 points ·
2 years ago
· edited 2 years ago
Agreed, an ETF will almost certainly turn into a disaster at some point. The coins will be stolen, forks will be handled controversially, there will be issues with fungibility (eg. someone will "trace stolen coins" to the ETF's stash), the world will freak out when a bunch of retirees lose their life savings after doing the equivalent of buying BTC at $20k, etc. etc. It'll also get the sort of people who love regulation more into BTC, which is never good.
But investors want it, so it'll probably happen eventually. In particular, I totally condemn trying to get regulators to interfere in the free market more than they already do by blocking any ETF. (When the SEC was last looking into this, I had actually written a long document that I was going to send to them in order to comment on many technical issues with their proposed Bitcoin ETF regulation, but I decided not to send it because I don't want to have even the slightest hand in regulations.)
An ETF probably will increase the price a lot (until the ETF suffers its near-inevitable catastrophe), which has some pros and cons.
Note that an ETF can't affect Bitcoin itself, just the ETF investors and the market. There is no voting of any sort in Bitcoin, so it's not as if holding a lot of BTC gives you any power over Bitcoin, for example. I do agree with Andreas that the creation of a "corpo-Bitcoin" seems probable, perhaps after the ETF loses a ton of BTC and wants to undo it.