'A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.' This was Satoshis original vision and intended use for Bitcoin. What has developed in contrast is the use of Bitcoin mostly as a speculative SoV hedge against inflation. How many of us use our sats as an alternative to the MoE provided(imposed upon us) by the banks? Most of us have ended up holding Sats and enjoying the gains relative to fiat but unable to easily spend our Bitcoin and escape the fiat system. I suggest this is far from an accident of fate but rather a deliberate and obstructive response from the legacy fiat power brokers- bankers and governments. Governments have made any Bitcoin transaction potentially taxable as they have deemed Bitcoin a speculative commodity. This makes the lawful use of Bitcoin as a MoE an extremely inconvenient nightmare if you are to record and report every transaction relative to fiat at the time of those transactions and pay the relvevant CGT. Bankers have in many jurisdictions refused to bank Bitcoin businesses with the exception that in most jurisdictions a few CEXes are provided with banking access- thus enabling the KYC tracking and tracing of Bitcoin and preventing any sizable Non KYC market from establishing. Given this background then the approval of ETFs now furthers the apparent 'legitimacy' of Bitcoin as a speculative commodity/investment and it results in an ever growing proportion of the Bitcoin in existence being held by institutional custodians- thus removing all those Bitcoins from any use as MoE tokens. My contention is the banks and governments have taken this approach of capture and control of Bitcoin in order to isolate it from use as a MoE (where it would pose a real threat to their power) and quarantined it instead into the role of a speculative commodity. As a speculative commodity it still poses some challenge to the fiat model as the more fiat that is converted into Bitcoin the less the fiat system is able to debase and extract value from peoples fiat savings- but, if ETFs give the legacy fiat brokers sufficient influence and control over the Bitcoin market, as some have argued that do then that might be seen as a risk/cost that can be managed. The Andreas Antonopoulos link below presents his view on how ETFs give the bankers potentially disruptive power over the protocol...in addition to the obvious removal of a significant amount of sats from direct bearer custody, increasing centralisation of custody and in addition to the ETFs furthering the redefinition of Bitcoin as a SoV as opposed to Satoshis original vision of Bitcoin being a decentralised peer to peer electronic cash free of institutional middlemen.