521–530 of 1001 posts
>"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 anoth…
How about a WBTC ETF?
Looks like these are the 11 tickers? Bitwise (BITB) ARK Invest/21Shares (ARKB) Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL) Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (FBTC) WisdomTree Bitcoin Trust (BTCW) Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (BRRR) Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF (DEFI) Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC)
Most of these old ones seem to be listed in Germany and Paris.
In the hypothetical case that a Bitcoin ETF gets hacked and its wallet(s) emptied, what happens? Is it any different from, say, a gold ETF having its physical gold stolen?
I will note that the ETFs are using Coinbase, Gemini, and Fidelity for custody. These companies have been providing Bitcoin custody for years without being hacked AFAIK.
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The global financial system can handle considerably more than three (3) transactions per second.
There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network. There are other problems in terms of adoption and infrastructure etc, but the actual potential for humankind to have a single currency global low-barrier payment system is there. But this is more like the early days of the internet. The internet seemed pointless to most people even as late…
There unfortunately is, to open a channel you have to make a Bitcoin transaction, and you can't use lightning without opening a channel. Bitcoin processes a max of ~220M transactions per year so to onboard the world onto lightning with only one channel each would take a few decades.
A real layer 2 could solve it, or having some trustless way to use BTC on other chains
So here's a question I don't know off hand: Can someone short bitcoin with this ETF?
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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…
Also if you want to attribute the decline of Rome to any monetary policy, deflation is much more likely. Periods of deflation in the 4th and 5th centuries led to hoarding and burying of coins rather than productive use of wealth, leading to declines and further deflation. Rome never escaped from this deflationary trap and many of these coin hoards were never dug up. Ironically bitcoin attempts to replicate this faile…
Also I find it humorus when people complain about deflation, which pretty much is the natural condition of the world. New techniques and improvements will unenviably lead to products costing less. The problematic factor has always been the current ruling money being controlled by a central authority who will debase it.
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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…
Also if you want to attribute the decline of Rome to any monetary policy, deflation is much more likely. Periods of deflation in the 4th and 5th centuries led to hoarding and burying of coins rather than productive use of wealth, leading to declines and further deflation. Rome never escaped from this deflationary trap and many of these coin hoards were never dug up. Ironically bitcoin attempts to replicate this faile…
But in the past, money was made of materials that themselves had major value - like silver. And so you couldn't just print more money, because you had to have the valuable resources that it was made of to do so. So the way the Empire dealt with this was by simply reducing the percent of those values. Wiki has a table showing the composition of the Roman Denarius over time here. [1] The original denarius, from the 3rd century BC was 95%+ pure silver. By the 3rd century AD it was down to 5% silver. So the process of printing money in ancient times, ended up making the old money worth more, which is the exact opposite of what happens now a days!
A good analog here is the US penny. We've been debasing it over time, but all the way up until 1982, the penny was made with at least 95% copper. [2] So old pennies are actually worth more than $0.01 in raw materials, which is why it's currently illegal to melt pennies (and nickels) or sell them for their material value. So there are plenty of people hoarding these, waiting for the government to eventually declare them obsolete - enabling them to melt them down and make a large profit. It's a nice investment because your upside is uncapped and your max loss is $0, if you can get them at around the fiat rate.
Now imagine if 225 pennies was a year's salary, as was the case for e.g. Julius Caesar's professional soldiers and Denarii. It creates a huge motivation for hooooold, precisely caused by the government spending. Same today where the more we inflate the currency, the more old pennies become worth.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius#Value,_comparisons_an...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)#His...
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> addresses are completely public. Addresses in Bitcoin are pseudoanonymous. Many criminals have evaded prosecution for years (for example, the MtGox thieves) despite moving billions in the clear on the blockchain. You are feigning ignorance about the true nature of Bitcoin which is quite obviously designed to enable very strong privacy, as noted by even by its inventor in the original paper; let's not even discuss t…
MtGox thieves evaded prosecution because no one was doing tracing back then. Chainalysis got started specifically to link all their activity and is now a giant graph connecting all the "pseudonymous" addresses. And the thieves laundered most of their stolen coin through exchanges, not chain transactions, strange how they didn't want that very strong privacy. There's none of that left on Bitcoin, it's been indexed, cl…
The fact that ChipMixer was busted in an international law enforcement operation should indicate to you the nature of the beast. Just like in the case of SilkRoad, there are a myriad copy cats which are still online. It's a small piece of computer code anyone can run. So money laundry on bitcoin to a nearly untraceable level can be done by any service that can setup some kind of network connection and run a bit of computer code.
This is unprecedented in the history of finance and the main practical benefit of Bitcoin other than speculation.