even though right now, an overwhelming majority of status quo institutions don't necessarily recognize bitcoin as a good kind of an asset to hold.
Do you think that this still holds true? Or is it possible that a lot of institutions don't necessarily admit in public that they are holding BTC or considering to acquire BTC? What status quo institutions are you mostly referring to here?
I don't have any specific pieces of data that I would like to quote or be able to quote, yet I get the sense that we are still in very early stages of adoption whether we are attempting to analyze individual adoption, institutional adoption and/or governmental adoption. Sure some of them are accumulating bitcoin on the side to the extent that they are able to do that. Some institutions and governments have reporting obligations, but it does not mean that they report what they are doing, unless the laws are very strict on that, such as in the publicly held company has even more strict reporting obligations.
Even with the recent introduction of bitcoin spot ETFs. Sure, they provided some avenues for some individuals, institutions and governments to get into BTC (or at least price exposure) who would not have otherwise been ready, willing and/or able to get into BTC, but even that obviously successful opening of a investment product seems to be in very early days, and ONLY the earliest of folks had gotten into BTC through that vehicle.. and yeah some of those who had been early into the ETF might have been overly greedy because they are trying to front run the ones who are coming in later, but the mere showing of a lot of interest at the start does not likely signify that those early entrants to the ETF represent large segment of institutions (and they well might not even be institutions, but instead a bunch of scattered individuals). I am pretty sure that the ETF providers are going to have some reporting requirements in regards to the composition of folks buying into their ETFs.
The strategic relevance of BTC in global economics has been brought up a couple of times and it would be more than ignorant to not include BTC into a diversified portfolio strategy.
The truth of the matter is that a lot of the population is still ignorant about BTC. For years, we have been hearing that "everyone knows about bitcoin now," and related kinds of claims that attempt to imply bitcoin is mature or is maturing or needs to be considered as a mature asset, which largely is a bunch of bullshit. Sure, more and more people are learning about bitcoin, and they are hearing the word bitcoin, and even some folks are choosing to get involved in bitcoin, in case it catches on, but still merely hearing the word bitcoin and being able to say a few descriptive things about it, does not mean that people really know what bitcoin is, except in some superficial and likely inaccurate sense.. including many times the most immediate thoughts are going to be "oh wow, look at that bitcoin thing. Price has gone up a lot over the years. Too bad that I did not get some. It's too late to get in now." And then after they come to these superficial assessments, they either get on with their day or they will tend to have the same response, every time they come across the term bitcoin.. and another thing is that they most likely don't know the difference between bitcoin and crypto, so anything that comes up in the news related to crypto (aka various shitcoins or other projects), they may also summarily include that into their general presumption that it relates to bitcoin (which surely is not an untrue assessment - because there is likely quite a bit of ongoing reluctance or even perceived inabilities to really investigate into figuring out some more accurate information sources to be able to better able to sort through how bitcoin fits into the picture more specifically - and more importantly the sound money and individual autonomy attributes of bitcoin).
By the way, you seem to be making quite a bit of presumptions regarding what an average person looks like, which is that most people are not already diversified investors, so yeah they might have some stake in their personal residence, and they might have a 401k (or some other retirement account) that includes the holdings of stocks and bonds (index funds), yet there are likely an overwhelming majority of folks who don't have any kinds of meaningful investments... so how are they going to think about a "diversified portfolio" when they are not already at that stage. Sure, even the folks who already have investments and a "diversified portfolio" are largely not choosing to include bitcoin into their holdings, and so they are still likely ignorant about bitcoin.
I am not sure who comes to bitcoin first? It would seem that the already investing folks might at least have some ideas about how to invest, versus a lot of folks new to investing are either going to learn about investing, but they might come to investing as a form of gambling and/or trading, so it could take them a bit of time and mistakes before they learn the difference between trading/gambling and investing.
Most people focus on what El Salvador has paid for their acquired BTC in total and what their holdings are worth now, but I think Bukelele was hoping for more cascade effects in terms of people and companies using favorable BTC conditions in the country. But the problem is that they are fighting so many other issues, like povery and a lack of food, which makes it close to impossible to mobilize positive sentiment for a country-wide experiment involving BTC. Sometimes I think it would have been even more interesting to see how a far more stable but still small country would have done.
We are stuck with the history that we have, and in some sense we are lucky that El Salvador has been so smart about their approach to bitcoin. Of course, they have challenges of poverty, which likely contributes to their inabilities to invest more into bitcoin, and maybe it already seems that they are being overly aggressive in their bitcoin investment, yet from my attempts to do the numbers, they seem to have a pretty whimpy investment into bitcoin (less than $400 million holdings of bitcoin and $7 billion of annual revenues), even though it seems to be a lot.. but at the same time, even that relatively seemingly whimpy investment into bitcoin is showing quite a bit about how bitcoin can be used responsibly to buttress a country's budget.
This is another experiment that could bring interesting results over the course of the next few years. El Salvador is trying while other countries are holding back without good reason.
It surely can be dangerous if El Salvador tries to overly fuck around with shitcoins, and so it could end up having some slippery-slope effects if they are not able to keep some of there debt issuance (token creation) or whatever are the details in check, and so within any of their bitcoin adoption, they are still needing to dance around real world dynamics, and hopefully they do not end up losing their way or becoming hypocrites in their actual real world practices. With any of these discretionary matters, there sometimes might need to be some practicalities, and I am not going to presume that they are going overboard in whatever shitcoins they are allowing to seep into various aspects of their budgeting matters (or various projects that might seem ambiguous in regards to going down shitcoin routes).
