'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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSv0J4bfBCc
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165 sats \ 3 replies \ @02bcd3eeb0 14 Aug
If Bitcoin can fail based on a few entities controlling a lot of coins, then it was never going to succeed in the first place. It's better we find out now rather than in 100 years time.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 14 Aug
This is my take. You can be against the ETFs but also realize that they are inevitable. That's my take.
And when I say against them I meaning if you have 100 dollars and want to dump it for bitcoin you hold your own keys vs. buying an ETF. I am not opposed to freedom. If people have money locked up in retirement accounts and can buy many assets I'm not opposed to them being able to buy a financial asset that then holds bitcoin.
There's a lot of dumb takes on the ETFs.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 14 Aug
It depends how you define failure, but if we take the stated intention of the white paper seriously then ETFs definitely and directly undermine that intention.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @02bcd3eeb0 14 Aug
ETFs are simply an attack on the social layer of Bitcoin. There will be many more such attacks, and they will get much more sophisticated. Best thing we can do to resist these attacks is ignore them & use Bitcoin the way we think it should be used.
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25 sats \ 0 replies \ @sagars209 14 Aug
My hope is eventually the price parity between the ETFs and actual Bitcoins will break and BTF ETFs like everything will trend to 0 against the bearer asset bitcoin!! that will take sometime but will happen eventually. Now you may ask how? well i don't know but there are many ways how it can happen 1. ETF owners will eventually ask the question why Bitcoin is going up forever ? and they would come to the realization that ETFs are just an IOU and not the real thing and it makes sense to hodl the real thing. 2. Coinbase / other custodians might get hacked and lose some of the coins which will be an eye opener for the ETF holders
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25 sats \ 8 replies \ @OT 14 Aug
I think its a little disappointing to see so much bitcoin gone into the ETFs (already 500k I think) after only 6 months. I hope it starts to tapers off a bit as people become more educated. If it doesn't.... we might be in trouble
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Silent_Hodler 14 Aug
Those who buy the ETF would probably never buy spot BTC so I’m on the fence here. Is bad because of centralization and good because it increases pace of supply reduction hence increasing price.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 14 Aug
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted a chart to X on Aug. 13 showing that the ETFs now hold 909,700 Bitcoin
#648117
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-bitcoin-etfs-on-track-to-top-satoshi-s-btc-stack-soon
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 14 Aug
Tried raising this issue on reddit r/Bitcoin many times with little success and mostly got shut down and censored as the majority of the posters and even some moderators there are pro ETF which I can only guess is either driven by short term price pump greed or corporate banker paid social media operatives.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 14 Aug
Maybe. I mean you can't control who gets into bitcoin. And no one knows what's going to happen. If we really get hyperinflation in the fiat system, the people holding the ETF's will suddenly realize why its best to hold your own keys.
I do see the point though that if you're holding your keys and you have your portion of bitcoin that can never be debased, it might just be good enough. Its just that we see and hear all the "revolutionary" and more radical opinions here, nostr and X. The majority of bitcoin holders might have a completely different view.
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1 sat \ 3 replies \ @jgbtc 14 Aug
What is your goal for raising the issue on reddit or here? Let's say everyone agrees with you. Then what?
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 14 Aug
The point of raising the issue is to hopefully enable discussion and debate and build an informed community.
Knowledge is power.
Freedom of speech is fundamental to healthy free markets.
An informed community would IMO be less inclined to buy ETFs.
However far from everyone on Reddit agreed, in fact most there spoke in favour the ETFs and strongly resisted my efforts to raise these issues, with censorship being used to silence the topic on several occasions, and vigorous trolling the rest of the time!
I suggest it would be naive to think fiat money does not fund social media operatives to observe and influence social media narratives...control of the narrative is effectively control of the market...and imo that malign influence is what is now increasingly evident on r/Bitcoin...it is strongly implied wherever respondents seek to avoid the facts and issues and either distract or shoot the messenger.
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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @jgbtc 14 Aug
What do you propose we do about ETFs?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi OP 14 Aug
Discuss how they demonstrably undermine the p2p decentralised MoE fundamental basis, ethos and value of the protocol and therefore encourage people to self custody and not buy into ETFs?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Systemling32 14 Aug freebie
Don't be so pessimistic. What happened to "everything is good for Bitcoin"?
For a couple of reasons I don't see a need to bow to the ETFs or to fear them. Everything will be fine in the end and if a few corporations buying Bitcoin is bad for Bitcoin, than it has failed already.
Take the fees: Let's say you are Goldman Sachs and are holding $400+M in iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT). The ETF has yearly management fees of 0.25% meaning that Goldman Sachs will be paying 1 Million dollars in fees every year.
This should be a heavy incentive to venture into the possibilities of self-custody. Especially if you consider that the absolute fees rise with rising bitcoin price while the cost to self-custody is pretty much the same whether you hodl 500$ worth or 50Bn.
Once the regulation around that has settled all major ETF holders are incentivized to self-custody and are rewarded heavily for it, even if ETF fees compete towards near zero.
And I agree that Bitcoin is meant as a medium of exchange (among other functions) but I predict that will only happen after it has achieved a solid role as a store of value.
The more liquidity flows into Bitcoin, the larger the payment network becomes and the price can rise naturally to a point where it will have less volatility, making it a better medium of exchange and unit of account.
Bitcoin ETFs are not cypherpunk and honestly quite boring to me, but they are inevitable and might help us grow Bitcoin as a monetary network.