So, the much anticipated (under speculators) Bitcoin ETFs have recently been approved by the SEC. Most speculators bought into the hype, expecting a massive increase in the Bitcoin price.
The question you have to ask yourself is this :
1. Do you want large institutional financial organisations buying large amounts of bitcoins and then locking it up in centralized trading platforms?
2. Do you want Bitcoin to be a commodity or a currency? ETFs will destroy the goal of Bitcoin becoming a currency.
3. ETFs take direct investment capital into personal ownership of Bitcoin away and it pulls that capital into centralized trading platforms. (Those coins are owned by the trading platform, because they control the private keys)
4. Fiat whales get control over bitcoins and can be used to manipulate the Bitcoin price. (They control the traditional Fiat investment options, so they will gradually increase their ownership of bitcoins to control that too)
5. ETFs destroy pseudo anonymity, because it is highly regulated with strict KYC requirements implemented to identify every trader on their platform.
6. Bitcoin's future success rely on actual coins being transfered on the Blockchain, because it generates miners fees to reward the miners. What happens when the Block reward falls away and not enough transaction happen, because bitcoins are locked up in ETFs.
I hope people are not too blinded by greed to see the dangers of Bitcoin ETFs and the centralization of the tokens in Fiat controlled trading platforms.
Let's discuss..
Do you still think Bitcoin ETFs are the Knight on the white horse?
1. Nothing wrong with this. People can choose to use Bitcoin in whatever way they want. It's hard money, if they want to use it purely as an investment or store of value through an investment broker that is perfectly fine.
2. Commodity, currency...these are just labels. Bitcoin is what it is. ETFs existing don't change what it is. ETF doesn't change one line of code of the bitcoin protocol. Nothing is destroyed by ETFs existing.
3. This is basically a repeat of #1, and again, nothing wrong with this. PEOPLE decide if they want to buy an ETF or buy actual Bitcoin. They are free to decide what they want to do.
4. If this is talking about the issuers of the ETFs, they literally just have to buy and sell however much bitcoin according to how much of the ETF the investors are buying and selling. The issuers don't decide how much bitcoin they buy and sell. This is not manipulation, it's just an investment vehicle. Also I have no idea why some people equate ownership of bitcoins to ownership over Bitcoin. The two are not remotely the same thing. Bitcoin is decentralized and "ownership", if anything, would be the many thousands of bitcoin nodes and miners, not who owns how many Sats.
5. Don't even know why this point is being made. People investing in bitcoin through an ETF don't have access to the actual bitcoin so pseudo-anonymity isn't even an issue because they don't own bitcoin.
6. At a time when seemingly every other day someone makes a thread on here complaining about the tx fees (even when the fees are back down to like $2 lol) you are claiming that we are going to see an issue with fees not being high enough in the future even as Bitcoin adoption grows massively. I have no idea why anyone would ever worry about this because it is the opposite of a problem for Bitcoin. At not point will not-filled blocks ever be an issue, the issue is getting L2 solutions ready so that everyone isn't trying to cram into tiny blocks and paying ridiculous fees in the future. So this is a total non-worry.
Bitcoin ETFs are not a Knight on a white horse, not sure anyone would ever describe it as that. But it is also not some evil thing lol. Nothing whatsoever wrong with ETFs. Nobody is forced to buy the ETF instead of buying Sats. People are excited about ETF because it means more buying of Bitcoin and therefore a higher price, and a higher price means more people adopting Bitcoin (cuz let's be honest almost everyone first gets into bitcoin for its ability to increase one's wealth), so it means Bitcoin growth in the world. It is silly to try to make ETFs to be some bad evil thing just because it is very different than owning actual bitcoin. It's an investment vehicle that will lead to a higher price of bitcoin and therefore more bitcoin adoption, that's it. Neither good nor evil, but good for bitcoin adoption.