1
boy those ETFs were the juice bitcoin really needed eh
(awful.systems)
that drop was one hour after the latest billion tethers
the new narrative is apparently that the pump is in 90 days when financial advisors are finally ready to push bitcoin ETFs on their customers (for some reason)
ETFs put bitcoin on steroids!! y'know, asthmatic with shrunken balls
the bitcoin market is fake and in tethers, but the retail securities market is real and in dollars
my brother in Satoshi, you are the exit liquidity
I scrolled too far up and motherfucking Lemmy ate my fucking comment. Fuck this Web 2.0 garbage. You get a shorter reply, yay. Also I'm not re-linking everything; search Wikipedia for anything confusing, like "futures market" or "spot market" or "basket of goods."
A commodity futures ETF is a way to improve the arbitrage that an individual investor experiences, while also reducing their exposure to spot markets. In particular, an investor only holds shares in a fund, and the fund does the actual trading; also, the fund only trades futures, although they do typically have a "basket" which holds physical commodities at a secure location.
For example, I hold shares of precious-metals ETFs. This means that, unlike e.g. somebody who has gold coins in their safe at home, I have to trust that the ETF managers will still exist tomorrow and that the financial system will still honor their contracts; this is technically increased risk. But in exchange, I don't have to physically receive and store any precious metals, and also I get theoretically better returns due to the implicit arbitrage in futures markets.
Fun fact: BTC is overpriced, mostly from grifters and miners pumping and hyping the market. However, arbitrage sees overpriced commodities as an opportunity, and a futures ETF can produce value for its investors merely by insisting that the commodity should be valued less. This is also why the spot ETFs were not approved by SEC; the spot market for BTC is quite volatile and it's not clear that a BTC spot trader would produce value for investors.
My intuition (and the sneer I wrote) is that basically crypto has historically been a free market of grift and fraud. Any attempts to launder or legitimise crypto trading via regulation and policing is just gonna drive the non-believing profiteers away. Is that anywhere close to the truth?
Yeah, that's my take too.
Crypto has a "base utility" for illegal activity. Say the price for BTC based on that is 10% of the current inflated price. Integrating BTC into the traditional financial market would in the near term drive down the price closer to the "base price", as well as closing off a number of avenues to add "dirty" money into the system.