Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC • Hacker News Board

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#531

Post by pavlov » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:44 AM UTC

My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain.

A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividends, there was a coupon that you could cut off with scissors and use to claim the income.

Imagine you show up today at a Charles Schwab office with a 1977 Apple Computer stock certificate, and ask to sell it. That piece of paper is theoretically worth more than a Bitcoin (thanks to stock splits). But the Schwab branch surely won’t buy it, they’ll send you away. Getting your piece of paper recognized as stock that you can actually trade in modern systems is a separate process.

That’s how it will be with Bitcoin in 2050. You contact Coinbase’s customer service AI and tell them you have an actual Bitcoin on the chain and you’d like to sell it. They’ll politely redirect you to the compliance department that will inform you that it may take up to six months to verify the provenance of your quaint original Bitcoin that’s not registered in the modern custodial systems - assuming your coin has no history with mixers and other addresses of interest to law enforcement, of course.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#532

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:45 AM UTC

treyd wrote: post #250

jekrb wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the work these folks do to increase market efficiency does produce real-world value, as slower verifiable economic information would increase periods of uncertainty and price slippages? Or the HFT engineers producing research and products that speed up general compute, such as accelerating SHA and ED25519 signature verification, so that their trading shops get information faster? I wonder if there are actuall…

Slippage in the price of cabbages at my corner market? I don't think so. There's very good evidence that as the finance sector grows to be a larger portion of the economy (which it very much is compared to 50 years ago) that increasing inequality goes along with it, as the profits made in the finance sector are mostly rent seeking from the rest of the economy. You could also interpret it as a private tax on all other…

Just look at UK... Largely based on finance sector and it does look pretty bleak for those outside... And I am not even sure if that is yet the end state...

There is some value there, but the cut they get is likely too large already. Then again it is all just fake numbers...

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#533

Post by handojin » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:45 AM UTC

x86x87 wrote: post #316

benlivengood wrote: post #287

Finally a workaround for high transaction fees! This should also solve the scalability issues quite a bit by reducing the need to record as many transactions in the first place once the exchanges hold most of the coins. Finally this should reduce the long-term potential in mining as the block reward keeps reducing exponentially with lower expectations of transaction fees. Sometimes regulatory solutions do fix hard te…

There are already L2 solutions like the Lightning Network.

I think the joke is sailing over your head?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#534

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:49 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #531

My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain. A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividen…

You know, those coins that satoshi mined are too high risk for our blockchain and bitcoin. So we just blacklisted all of them. And basically also all that haven't moved in 1 year from the date we did. Sorry your coins are forever dirty and no miner will include transactions with them in a block...

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#535

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:49 AM UTC

Kathula wrote: post #528

adastra22 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Explain how Bitcoin, which for the next 100 years will continue to print new coins, is attempting to replicate deflation. Maybe inadvertently, by people losing access to their Bitcoins for various reasons, but the design itself certainly isn't deflationary. Not even in its final form, the supply will merely be constant. Also I find it humorus when people complain about deflation, which pretty much is the natural cond…

Constant supply creates deflation because population/usage increases. You're right that products will cost less - which is exactly what deflation is.

The reason it's because taboo in modern times is ostensibly because it creates a disincentive to investment. Why invest in something that might return 5% with some risk, if your money will be worth an almost guaranteed 5% more in a year anyhow? IMO the "real" reason is because it's a proxy for politics. Governments spending trillions of dollars sends inflation skyrocketing - the US is only slightly guarded against this because of our unique ability to 'export our inflation' - a web search can elaborate more on the term if one is unfamiliar with it. So opposing inflation is largely a proxy for opposing excessive spending which is one of the main political divides, which is odd because both parties spend like maniacs - but one pretends to not want to.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#536

Post by lkt » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:58 AM UTC

demondemidi wrote: post #516

Octokiddie wrote: post #205

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…

Nah. You’re over speculating. The real reason for the negative sentiment is that HN is mostly smart people.

That's absolutely not the case, HN is mostly people who think they're geniuses because they can program computers. Read the comments on any post about a topic you know a lot about and you'll see it's full of people talking very confidently about things they know very little about. There are of course some very smart people mixed in, but it's hard to pick those people out from the noise.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#537

Post by SilasX » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:58 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #56

ur-whale wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and what would happen during a fork? Now, that is a very interesting question. If said ETF did their homework properly, their handling of a fork should be described in detail in their prospectus. Not that I would ever buy a BTC ETF since it precisely negates what I believe Bitcoin to be useful for, but if I had to, I'd pick the one that would convert the forked coins back to BTC immediately after the fork. If enoug…

Wow, this actually is a critical point, and I'm surprised at what the outcome is. Essentially, it seems to me that these ETFs are saying they will abandon any rights to forked coins. That seems insane to me, though, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding? I mean, if there is a hard fork, some percentage of total value will go with one chain and some percentage to the other - that's basically exactly what happened with the B…

Since you mention the past disputes over custody and forks:

Earlier discussion from 2017, when customers wanted to sue Coinbase for keeping the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork corresponding to their deposits:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910822

I remember Gemini crediting me with my BCH eventually. (Unfortunately, long after the peak to $4k.) LocalBitcoins gave some classic BTC credit to make up for it.

Some silly analogies I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913261

I believe that fears of a similar situation are what led a lot of people to temporarily pull ETH off of exchanges and out of smartcontracts over the time of the ETH switch from PoW to PoS, as that spawned another fork.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#538

Post by MacsHeadroom » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:59 AM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #112

ur-whale wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and what would happen during a fork? Now, that is a very interesting question. If said ETF did their homework properly, their handling of a fork should be described in detail in their prospectus. Not that I would ever buy a BTC ETF since it precisely negates what I believe Bitcoin to be useful for, but if I had to, I'd pick the one that would convert the forked coins back to BTC immediately after the fork. If enoug…

Not that I would ever buy a BTC ETF since it precisely negates what I believe Bitcoin to be useful for Yeah I know what you mean, although one competitive advantage of the fund is it can be invested in a tax-free savings accounts not subject to capital gains tax (I haven't seen a practical way to do the same with the raw commodity).

You can hold raw Bitcoin in a self-directed IRA. You just hold it and do the paperwork. You can hold just about anything in a self-directed IRA, including beanie babies.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#539

Post by xwolfi » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:02 AM UTC

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #526

I can't help thinking that Bitcoin ETFs could mark "Peak Bitcoin". When lots of people are trading it at their high street broker in their regular account, Bitcoin becomes just a number in a box - a crypto currency without crypto - with nothing underlying it.

It's hot air all the way down !

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#540

Post by npoc » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:02 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #400

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol power usage is such a strawman argument. 1% of all electricity in USA is used watching Netflix but you don't hear people complaining. But running a global permissionless decentralised store of value currency network should supposedly be "super cheap" or it's an environmental disaster and must be stopped.

The reason that bitcoin's energy usage is a philosophical nightmare is because it's a system where energy consumption is the product. As opposed to industries which are "merely" energy-intensive, let's take aluminum refining for example, spending more energy to refine aluminum does not create more demand for aluminum, but spending more energy on bitcoin increases the price of bitcoin, which induces more demand, which…

The main problem here is that you're looking at the energy use as a waste. It's absolutely not, but in order to understand why, you need to understand what's wrong with the current monetary system and the terrible effects it is having on the world.

You're also missing that bitcoin's game theory means that it will ultimately only use unwanted/wasted energy. Bitcoin miners can mine anywhere in the world and those trying to use energy that's in demand by the general population won't be economical.