While exchanges can and do issue paper bitcoin, the ETF legally can't, they have to buy actual bitcoin when new investors buy shares in the ETF.

What we have to worry about is that this shift allows tradfi investors to get in the action, while slowly building up walls against self-custody and owning bitcoin outside of it. This is not, however, in the interest of BlackRock. They need the plebs to drive the price action.

In stock market companies, ETFs are centralizations of control. Blackrock buys so much that they become the major stockholder of pretty much all of the US and EU companies, vacuuming up voting power. By that, ETFs show the conflicts between different interests in the elite owner class, generally: great for the issuer while getting pension fund and private investment capital to flood the valuation. This latter part is great for other investors on the money side, the former part screws them in the voting power department. Small investors don't care, they never could influence anything anyway and just want the price action, but it creates a conflict with the other major owners UNTIL the money is right for them to say, whatever.

Bitcoin obviously has none of that, as there is no control over the network through majority ownership. Through this context, VanEck's "donations" to the core developers makes another kind of sense: they're using the ETF to get to what they perceive to be the locus of power. Also, the two biggest owners of Marathon are Vanguard and Blackrock, of Riot, same, Cipher Mining, same. And you bet someone's thought of buying 10 000 nodes with pocket change.