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.