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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely true in the West. I said millions because of every day crypto usage in countries like Argentina and Turkey, where inflation makes it challenging to save money, and in countries where there are high remittance rates. More builders are definitely needed to improve the crypto user experience across a range of categories.

...another fairytale about people in poor countries using crypto )))) Nothing beats good old USD or EURO as an asset if you live in a country with hyperinflation.

i trade bitcoin with other people here in argentina several times a year; it's by far the easiest and safest way to send money either into or out of the country, and it's widely used by money changers

remember that this is a country where the police take dollar-bill-sniffing dogs onto river ferryboats to prevent people from taking usd or eur across the river to their bank in uruguay

someone in a [dead] comment said, 'The most traded crypto assets in Argentina, by far, are dollar-pegged crypto-currencies.' this is absolutely correct, and from my point of view it's a total plague. also virtually everybody has their bitcoins in binance. but most of those people will still buy and sell bitcoin if that's what you want

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#472
post #394

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The bitcoin network is ultimately controlled by the economic weight of its largest holders. If the big funds control enough bitcoin, they will have the power to pick which fork holds value. Miners and node operators can operate on whichever fork they want, but that doesnt mean Coinbase or Fidelity or whoever is going to recognize that fork.

> Miners and node operators can operate on whichever fork they want, but that doesnt mean Coinbase or Fidelity or whoever is going to recognize that fork. Mate that isn't how it work. If Coinbase or Fidelity don't recognise the real blockchain then they no longer have real bitcoin, they have a forked coin (because they are not on the true bitcoin chain). The Bitcoin chain is determined by consensus of the majority of…

Yes, it’s all about the consensus of majority of the nodes! Not miners.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#473

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Speaking of Bitcoin specifically, if this is your view then you should take some time to understand the severe societal and economic problems that come with persistent deflation. And more generally, determining the optimal level of the money supply to match the needs of a dynamic economy is not trivial — there is no simple formula involving straightforwardly measurable variables that I am aware of.

> And more generally, determining the optimal level of the money supply to match the needs of a dynamic economy is not trivial No, we don't need some grand wizards in an ivory tower to finely tune the amount of money in the economy, that idea is absurd. The economy has worked fine for thousands of years before they started doing that. In fact, since they started doing it we've seen ever growing boom and bust cycles.

...there were a lot of boom and bust cycles before the federal reserve

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet here we are, discussing a Bitcoin ETF, which involves plenty of corporate middlemen and has no benefit to the Bitcoin community besides increasing Bitcoin's speculative value.

You reckon it's a charity to boost bitcoin holders' wealth? The purpose of this ETF is to extract profit, the rest is unintended.

Haha, ok, all successful investments are charities.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#475

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more. Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year. If that shoe wer…

>Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government.

If you start from scratch with a non-exchange wallet and get paid in BTC for something to it, sure. But if you want to get in with any fiat, you're going through an exchange, which means KYC, which means you definitely need the approval of the exchange (and by proxy your local government/tax authority).

It was a simple solve by governments to get crypto controlled centrally by proxy for most users this way.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending Really? Direct? Pretty sure the Roman’s had many other things happening upstream of overspending. Many things were going wrong.

We have as many reasons to believe that the legacy of the Roman Empire, through the Catholic Church, still exists today and is a billion people strong as we do why it fell at any one particular day for any one particular reason.

i can't parse your comment, but it seems to presuppose that the roman empire fell on one particular day; there seem to be a lot of candidates, though. which one do you mean

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#477
>"The historic approval paves the way for the first regulated exchange-traded product in the U.S. to give investors direct exposure to the price of Bitcoin without requiring them to buy it or worry about self-custody. Investors will buy shares in ETFs holding Bitcoin as its underlying asset."

Interesting!

Looks like we've paved the way for yet another abstracted financial instrument -- which sits on top of yet another abstracted financial instrument...

My only question, at this point in time, were I to have one, would be something like the following:

What's the maximum levels of financial abstraction -- that can be stacked on top of one another?

?

???

Related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_instrument

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrdqQZ8FFc

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#478

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It's hard for humans to put ego aside and admit they were wrong. Also hard to put emotion aside and forget the pain of missing out from $100 to $45k. I think there's still an easy 10X to match Gold and 100X is possible if it becomes the world's preferred reserve asset

Imagine thinking you can prove that an argument is settled due to price movements. Bitcoin may go to a billion and it won't change the fundamental premise: You can have ALL the Bitcoin in the world, all of it, and if there's no buyer outside, nobody willing to trade anything for it you have nothing. Now use the same argument with all the land in US, all the crop in India, all the fish in the Pacific, all the gold in…

> Bitcoin may go to a billion and it won't change the fundamental premise:

Haha, bitcoin never even attempted to solve your "fundamental premise", and never made any such promise. Bitcoin is like fiat money in that regard, and different in other regards.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#479
post #386

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> If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. Not only was the decline of the Roman empire too slow and variegated to attribute to a single cause, "inflation and overspending" isn't even on the shortlist. If we're oversimplifying, it was more akin to the opposite of the sentiment that you're shoo…

The Romans were only able to fund the expansion of the empire by overextending their resources. This meant that the empire became too expensive to maintain without relying on tactics like currency debasement, subsequently triggering many of the other symptoms of decline that you listed. Of course, we aren't living in the Roman Empire today. But what is consistent is that delegating monetary policy to a third party me…

> The Romans were only able to fund the expansion of the empire by overextending their resources.

No, they never ran out of the resources needed to expand. It just became more individually profitable to spend those resources on internal competition, and eventually civil war, than on growing the pie.

> This meant that the empire became too expensive to maintain without relying on tactics like currency debasement, subsequently triggering many of the other symptoms of decline that you listed.

Even if we take this at face value, that doesn't sound like currency debasement causing the collapse - if anything it allowed them to stave it off at least for a time. Businesses renegotiating their loans/bonds is normally a precursor to going bankrupt, but that doesn't mean renegotiating your loans/bonds causes bankruptcy; if you took your loans/bonds in a form where you can't renegotiate them, that only makes you more likely to go bankrupt sooner.

(Traditional currencies are in many ways like a slightly odd bond that doesn't pay interest)

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drugs, gambling, crimes all satisfy some people's needs I've seen the exact same people crying about Bitcoin's "drug use" then turn around and applaud marijuana and psychedelics for their medicinal effects. I call bs on the "drug" scapegoat. People are salty they work in tech and don't understand bitcoin.

Is it possible that you can understand bitcoin and still not like it?

Sure, then you're a person who doesn't like how some people solve some problems with bitcoin. That's fair, you don't have to like that.
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