It isn't realistic in the long term, or for just the next bull cycle? If your answer is a "No" for both, then I can't say that I agree. I believe QE/Brrr-Money-Printing, the possbility of multiple ETFs, and the Market Mania by investors during the next bull market in 2025 will all be enough to make Bitcoin surge to $500,000. If I'm wrong, OK. But it wouldn't be wrong to keep buying the DIP NOW, and HODL.
Plus I wouldn't trust Robert Kiyosaki and other book sellers like him. Most of the time, they're merely there to sell their books.
There could also be another hash war and if BlackRock and its cartel of ETF issuers have the same proposal in each of their registration statement, they may have some impact of their own on what's to be considered "The Bitcoin". Because they could follow one fork and threaten to dump the other side of the fork. What if the other side they plan to dump is Bitcoin, BTC?
I understand people who think that the spot BTC ETF should have a positive effect on the price, but apparently there are very few who think at all about the far-reaching consequences when it comes to such big predators as BR or Fidelity. I have never read the requirements for the BTC ETFs in detail, but it would be interesting to find out if any other company had a similar text in its conditions, or is this something that BR did first?
There is an old post on Reddit written by admin @theymos 4-5 years ago on the subject of BTC ETF, I have quoted it several times on the forum, and somehow it seems to me that it could be the closest to the truth.
Agreed, an ETF will almost certainly turn into a disaster at some point. The coins will be stolen, forks will be handled controversially, there will be issues with fungibility (eg. someone will "trace stolen coins" to the ETF's stash), the world will freak out when a bunch of retirees lose their life savings after doing the equivalent of buying BTC at $20k, etc. etc. It'll also get the sort of people who love regulation more into BTC, which is never good.
But investors want it, so it'll probably happen eventually. In particular, I totally condemn trying to get regulators to interfere in the free market more than they already do by blocking any ETF. (When the SEC was last looking into this, I had actually written a long document that I was going to send to them in order to comment on many technical issues with their proposed Bitcoin ETF regulation, but I decided not to send it because I don't want to have even the slightest hand in regulations.)
An ETF probably will increase the price a lot (until the ETF suffers its near-inevitable catastrophe), which has some pros and cons.
Note that an ETF can't affect Bitcoin itself, just the ETF investors and the market. There is no voting of any sort in Bitcoin, so it's not as if holding a lot of BTC gives you any power over Bitcoin, for example. I do agree with Andreas that the creation of a "corpo-Bitcoin" seems probable, perhaps after the ETF loses a ton of BTC and wants to undo it.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/theymos-activity-on-reddit-a-collection-of-posts-5153962OK, so the Giga-Chads have already opened a debate about the issue.
There's also another shower thought that I brought up before. What if the banksters and institutions like BlackRock hold more than 50% of the Bitcoin in circulation, and increasing. Could be say that Bitcoin as a currency has failed?