For now, the Bitcoin Strategy ProFund invests in Bitcoin futures contracts, and the fund holds no actual bitcoin, which creates two degrees of separation between investors and the sats they increasingly seek shelter from inflation in.
Lol! For the same reason it literally makes no sense to me! The only benefit bitcoin can have from this mutual fund, is free promotion! So some ignorant investors who might have not heard the name of bitcoin, will come to know the name and possibly will discover its potential. Apart from this, no beneift will be received by the crypto market. But some pro fund managers will continue to shift other's money into their own pocket using the name Bitcoin! Sometimes I wonder how stupid a peraon can be to invest in such bitcoin funds and not invest directly in bitcoin!
Are you detached from reality, avikz (nothing personal intended)?
I am not going to disagree with your overall premise that there is a lot of value in investing directly into bitcoin, but there are a whole hell of a lot of folks who invest through fund managers whether we are considering status quo rich individuals and/or institutions, and some institutions are not even able to buy and hold directly (absent the development of some better wide-spread custodial solutions that within acceptable limits of their investment guidelines).
Sure, there are potential dangers towards bitcoin's overall value proposition of direct ownership, but it seems quite pie in the sky to look at the world without considering the reality of various status quo financial institutions and practices and consider that all of those institutions and practices will just get abandoned because of bitcoin. It likely will take 30 years or longer for various kinds of institutions and practices to completely evolve, and we can hardly even speculate that we know how these matters are going to play out with a lot of specificity - and bitcoin is already designed in ways to prepare to fit into these systems and to cause gravitational pull of the value out of those various less sound practices into bitcoin, so sure there could be gradually and then suddenly, yet I doubt that we just get to the suddenly part without experiencing some gradually first.
Another thing.. there are all kinds of scenarios in which normies in their 20s and 30s might be just attempting to get started in their investment life and perhaps buy a house, but then they also might have a 401k at work, and the 401k restricts what they are able to invest into, and they end up barely having enough cashflow to invest in minimum ways and bitcoin might ONLY end up coming on their radar as a possible additional investing option because it becomes one of the options in their 401k.
I am not even saying what may or may not be better for bitcoin but instead trying to deal with reality, and probably in the end, everything is good for bitcoin even if it might take 30 to 50 years or even more to iron out quite a bit of the value gravitation into bitcoin and even for more concrete and widespread recognition of the various ways to gain exposure to bitcoin and some of those ways are preferable from an individual level, but they might be different from an institutional level - at least during transition into more and more bitcoin dominance phases.. which also seems inevitable even if it could take 30 to 50 years to witness some of these matters to play out in concrete ways from our current world-wide BTC adoption levels that are likely below 1% of the world's population to higher levels that even approach 50% or more of the population having significant stakes in bitcoin... perhaps? perhaps?