I, personally, nonetheless would presume that the degree that institutions are acquiring and investing in bitcoin to b relatively low and small. I am basing my speculation on what I understand about institutions, whether publicly held or privately held and I would even consider governmental into the category of possible institutions that engage in varying practices regarding their public openness
This is what I think myself actually
There is no reason for big financial institutions to invest in Bitcoin big time this time, either secretly or overtly. Bitcoin, for the time being, is mostly a speculative asset and will likely remain that way in the foreseeable future anyway (even though we all want it to become a store of value, so-called digital gold), therefore the only way big investors are going to make money with Bitcoin is via buying it low and selling it high. But who are they going to sell it to at, say, 1M dollars per coin (as such is going to be the price after the institutional money enters the market) if not too many people are going to buy bitcoins at 5k now?
I don't really disagree with anything that you are saying; however, the way that I frame the situation would seem to come out a bit different.
I don't really agree with assertions that attempt to minimize the importance of bitcoin by pigeon holing bitcoin into a "speculation" category because we are not talking about some shit coin or alt coin, which largely an overwhelming number of altcoins fall exactly into a speculation only category.
The reason that I assign little institutional attention or excitement about bitcoin is because of bitcoin's relative smallness rather than degree to which it is speculative.
In that regard, bitcoin remains only a blip on the radar of a lot of institutions, and even they cannot figure out reasonable institutional tools in order to really manage getting in or out of the asset, even if they were to want to hedge a small or even a mediocre percentage of their investment into bitcoin. Those custodial tools are coming, but still seem to be relatively slow in the making and the building of confidence of the BIGGER potential players.
Also one of the major ASS propositions of bitcoin remains on the individual level to empower individuals in the retention and the movement of their value, and perhaps only a few BIGGER type institutions are recognizing some kind of concrete value in that kind of power and monetary sovereignty.. which is a BIGASS use case that is already here.. and not speculation.
Banks, big institutions and governments neither need that level of autonomy over their value that can be gained through bitcoin because they already have such autonomy over the value through traditional institutions that they built around themselves.. those fucks....
Anyhow, the more and more that value increasingly gravitates towards bitcoin, then they are likely NOT going to have much if any choice to put at least some of their value into bitcoin, and later down the road, they will be incentivized to put more and more of their value into bitcoin because the longer bitcoin exists, the more and more value is going to gravitation into it causing a snowballing effect.