When you read “GBTC bought xxx bitcoin” you have to consider two things:
- Of course they are not buying coins from miners, so checking this amount versus newly minted coins is appalling, but ultimately näive. They are buying in the vast inverse of HODLers.
- When you read “buying”, you have to actually think “added to their AUM” as there are two main ways to add BTC to GBTC: give them USD, so that they actually buy BTC, of acquire GBTC shares “in kind” giving them actual BTC. This is by far the most interesting statistic in their report, and make you understand how much this instrument is actually playing with whale money.
I am going to update my thread with this reference and I will try to crunch some number in the accompanying
spreadsheet.
Last, no, contrary to the BTCE ETP there is no public address to check. You have to trust their numbers.
Oh, so basically they are just looking for HODLers then buy for them to somehow evade fees yet offer HODLers an additional amount for their BTC? Well then, if they hold huge amount of BTC, what purpose would they be having with the amount they hold? We all know that it is a risk once a huge percentage of Bitcoin is being held by a single company, they can control the price and dump it or just simply make multiple sell orders at a lower price in which many would buy and break the BTC or even all crypto market.
How could they not have public address btw?
I am not really clear the extent to which these various companies are required to be transparent with their BTC holdings, and of course, if they are registered or licensed in various jurisdictions, then they may have certain kinds of anti-fraud requirements, and I am NOT completely confident that various state actors are incentivized to require various BTC custodians to keep 100% reserves.
Of course, the BTC community would both prefer BTC custodians to keep 100% reserves and to have some kind of way to be audited in order to make sure that they are not engaging in fractional reserves (or rehypothication) practices.
Frequently, BTC custodians will have some amount of incentive to engage in fractional reserves, and even though BTC HODLers overall would like to make them hold 100% reserves, for quite some time, I have been suspecting that one of the governmental (and traditional financial institutional) attacks on bitcoin would be to allow these fucktwat custodians to engage in the same kinds of behaviors that traditional financial institutions have increasingly been able to get away with committing various kinds of frauds on the public - even recently, there has been additional loosening and even completely removing any kind of requirement whatsoever for banks to have to hold any kind of reserve before they can just create money out of thin air - so in that regard, I foresee that the main ways that BTC HODLers can fight these kinds of corrupt fractional reserve systems is to continue to require audits, transparency and even remove their coins out of those systems - which may well cause those large non transparent custodian systems to have a lesser value for their BTC than those BTC that are directly held - and sure, what I am saying seems to be a kind of pie in the sky thinking, but one of the powers of bitcoin remains the ability to directly take possession on very short notice - but another part would be to denigrate custodians and to discourage people from using them much if at all unless they are actually engaging in a certain amount of transparency in terms of their holdings - some kinds of credible and real time audits - which surely are possible systems to set up within BTC (programable money).