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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

#831

Post by reaperman »

killerstorm wrote: post #780
reaperman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll be amazed at the extent to which BTC will be able to be controlled by strong central governments. I'd be shocked if in ten years there's not granular control over which wallets contain "tainted" bitcoin and cannot be converted to fiat except through actual money laundering. There's been a lot of consolidation of the exchanges in USA, tons of KYC controls in place now, and old-school options like localb…

Well, it's been 15 years. The question is more like: Are OK with government control? Reminder - regulators reviewed SVB reports and found them adequate. Then apparently people found it's insolvent. Does it look adequate? Do you like a system if bank can become insolvent if people withdraw their money? That's presumably one of most competent countries in the world.

> The question is more like: Are OK with government control?

I simply doubt that my opinion, or even that of the majority of the public, would change the outcome of what the government decides to do. They seem to be on a pro-KYC/AML/FINRA/IRS path regardless of public opinion.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#832

Post by lottin »

sowbug wrote: post #554
lottin wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fork the bitcoin blockchain you have now two ledgers, each one telling you that a certain number of bitcoins really exist. Who is to say that one is right and the other is wrong? In this scenario, it's debatable how many bitcoins are in existence.

You might want to read the Bitcoin whitepaper. There is zero ambiguity in the situation you describe. That is the essence of the proof-of-work (or proof-of-stake, take your pick) solution to the Byzantine generals problem.

The ambiguity has to do with the fact that we don't know for sure which blockchain will prevail, because the protocol is unenforceable.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#833

Post by TrackerFF »

npoc wrote: post #824
TrackerFF wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your money, your call. But I'm wondering - why wouldn't you invest in business? Business are, after all, the drivers of economy. While cryptocurrencies could theoretically grow to "infinite" (finite supply and all. combined with fiat monetary policies), there must be some realistic limit to the growth, where the price starts to converge. For BTC, that price is somewhere in the single digit millions. Could make a long…

None of them offer the probability of bitcoin. It's the most asymmetrical bet I've ever seen. The only reason it's not already $10M/BTC is that noone understands what it is - many people think they do, but they don't. As someone who has studied the subject for 100s of hours, I haven't come across a single valid argument for why it won't absorb all the stored value in the world over time. The hardest part is just bein…

I'll try:

For BTC to absorb all stored value in the world, it would need to be the only currency in the world. That is the only way all assets in the world are bought/sold with BTC.

But that alone is, IMO, a non-starter. It assumes that all countries in the world would more or less give up control of their own currency and economy - if BTC is the only currency worth anything, why would anyone own or get paid in anything other than BTC? Which brings me to the next point...

This is not directed at you, but I think the BTC maxis severely underestimate the power and control that governments hold over these things. They can (and will) force you to pay your faxes, fees, and whatever they want in their currency, and have to power to use force if you chose not to.

If crypto poses a legitimate threat to that power and control, it is much easier to remove the threat than to adapt your system to it.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#834

Post by npoc »

notahacker wrote: post #802
npoc wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not argue semantics. With bitcoin you don't need "real money", you can exchange it directly person to person. In any case other countries that embrace bitcoin will always exist. It sounds like you need to learn what money really is. Try and figure out why mankind chose shells and beads as money, then gold and then fiat. It will help you understand why it will choose bitcoin next.

Some of us figured out that mankind ceased to use shells and beads (and many other things much more fixed in supply than Bitcoin) aeons ago because few people were required to settle their debts or taxes in them, and therefore their future value was entirely dependent on volatile collector sentiment rather than a broad segment of society needing them. I wonder when Bitcoiners will catch up...

No. Good attempt, but that's not the right answer.

At least it was better than "because you can make jewellery out of gold and it's got some industrial uses".

Let's look at it another way. Why did the people/government choose to make bank notes legal tender, when they already had gold as legal tender?

Why was gold legal tender in the first place? Why not beads?

I wonder when you'll catch up with bitcoiners?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#835

Post by injeolmi_love »

roenxi wrote: post #558
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…

The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can't change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude hi…

There’s a very small number of mining pools that control Bitcoin. All the USA has to do to force a hard fork is order them to run alternative mining software.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#836

Post by irusensei »

amjnsx wrote: post #614
optymizer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has survived by changing the narrative and getting people to buy the stories. It was going to replace money, but then it didn't because the network slowed down to the point where it was unusable. Nobody was going to wait 30 min for a transaction to complete. So then the message was flipped and Bitcoin was now 'an asset', not a currency, further supported by IRS's decision to tax it like an asset, so it was adverti…

> Nobody was going to wait 30 min for a transaction to complete Depends on the transaction. To buy coffee? Of course not, but there are transactions that can take hours or days to clear.

If people only knew that a card transaction is the equivalent of a 0 confirmation transaction between two “trust me bro” parties and that said card transaction takes days and a lot of institutional resources to clear…

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#837

Post by irusensei »

TillE wrote: post #481
tekchip wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This global warming rhetoric against bitcoin is nonsense right? The current financial system doesn't run off as many or more computers in datacenters around the globe? I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.

The global financial system can handle considerably more than three (3) transactions per second.

You know credit card transactions can take days to actually settle right?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#838

Post by johnwheeler »

tnel77 wrote: post #813

I’m only here to see the acrobats continuing to claim Bitcoin is a fraud, only for criminals, and “going to die any day now.” Have a nice day everyone! What an awesome achievement for the crypto community!

Maybe it’s that it turns morons into financial advisors is why people hate it.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#839

Post by ur-whale »

TrackerFF wrote: post #776
ur-whale wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No intrinsic value The rest of your long rant is basically useless, because the last 2 words above have strictly no meaning when put together

If you invest in a company that produces disinfectants, during a pandemic, you can reasonably assume that there's both demand, and that the value of the company is a function of their ability to produce disinfectant, how much inventory they have etc. - in fact, this can be measured / inferred through their financial reporting. Likewise, if you invest in a pharma company that produces insulin, and there's a insulin sh…

I am only saying that there is no such thing as intrinsic value.

Or to put it differently, it is an idea that has little to no predictive power and therefore is of no great value.

There is only one very reliable principle to reason with in that space: supply and demand.

It has been observed to work every time for thousands of years, and therefore very much akin to what physicist like to call a postulate or a law (as in the second law of thermodynamics, yet to be actually proven from other principles, but observed to work every single time in the real world).

Go back to all of the examples you listed above, and dig deep enough, you will see that every single item's vaunted intrinsic value boils down to one thing : there is a demand for these things or the product they put out in the market, therefore they have value.

I repeat : there is no such thing as intrinsic value, there is just supply and demand.

Intrinsic value is a delusion.

And in the case of Bitcoin, there is clearly demand for it. Therefore it has value.

Why there is demand for it is not something you can easily analyze, because you'd have to get inside the brain of every market participant, each of which has followed a different line of reasoning to get to a conclusion about the value of Bitcoin. Some of these will be rational. Some won't. It doesn't matter. Only the aggregate outcome does matter.

You are trying to claim that you don't understand why there is a demand for Bitcoin and you don't because in your world, things have to have "intrinsic value" for there to be demand for it.

    a) your premises are clearly incorrect: the current market price for Bitcoin clearly indicates that there is demand for it. Therefore it has value. Therefore the notion of "intrinsic value" is clearly of little practical use.

    b) the *reason* why there is demand for it may very well be hard for you to understand based on *your* postulate that things must have "intrinsic value" (no such thing, remember?) for there to be demand for something.
Just abandon the idea that intrinsic value is a valuable concept, get back to supply and demand, and the world will start making sense again.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#840

Post by injeolmi_love »

bluecalm wrote: post #737

Is there any guarantee that if this goes wrong (let's say ETF's are hacked and lose their BTC) then assets in other ETF's are safe? Let's say BlackRock ends up on the hook for billions after their BTC ETF goes wrong. Are my shares in iShares NASDAQ 100 ETF safe? I want to make sure I don't have any exposure to crypto world by owning stock ETFs. If there is any scenario that I am on the hook for crypto nonsense going…

You’re probably right about this issue. BTC is a bearer asset and is inherently difficult to store right- someone has to know the private key, and that someone could always irreversibly steal the funds (hopefully it’s multiple someones with a multisig). Especially with such a large pot of money all state backed hacker groups are going to be actively hunting for vulnerabilities.
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