Topic: How many Bitcoin do you think Wall St will own (Read 423 times)

I believe that there are already some big corporations who own bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies but the purchase has been taken place behind the scenes.
If they will start seeing mass adoption then they are going to release this information in order to pump the price for their own benefits.

They would like to own as much as possible or for that matter anybody who know and believes in this would like to buy at this price point as it’s very low and want to make the best gain for their future which crypto coins will provide in coming years

They own i think almost 10%, but after more times passes they will own much more if they will buy, maybe after years pass they will own almost 20% or something close, but this depends how much cost bitcoin when they buy.

What they will buy is determined by what people are willing to sell, Wall street can't buy all the bitcoin when we have just 21million which haven't been generated fully yet. I can say in the next 3 years, wall street will hold about 5%  to 15% of the bitcoin in existing, I don't think it can be more because many persons are willing to hodl their bitcoin as long as possible.

To be honest, they probably won't own a lot of actual bitcoins.

I suspect that when the next big bull market swings around and many of the existing institutional investors that has entered the bitcoin market during this bearish stretch actually puts their plans into action, they will be dealing more so with bitcoin derivatives than actual bitcoins.

This is simply because most of these institutions aren't really interested in bitcoin as a technology, but rather bitcoin as an investment. And derivatives, ETFs etc. allows them to achieve better returns with leverage (theoretically) in a bull market, and is more convenient for them than having to set up a whole infrastructure for holding BTC. Does that mean they will hold absolutely 0 bitcoin? No. But I think the ratio of their holdings of bitcoin financial products to actual BTC will be significantly higher than what people expect.

Wall Street isn't just brokers. It's asset management firms, hedge funds, and others that need to park loads of capital. These are institutions with literally trillions of dollars in equity on their books. The Blackrocks, the Morgan Stanleys, the Vanguards of the world.

I'm not saying all that money is coming into Bitcoin, but Wall Street doesn't make all its money through brokering. They've got fingers in many pies.

In the market of wallstreet, we don't know which companies really bought and will buy bitcoins to earn profitability with their company finances. Well, as of now I think wallstreet owns enough money to make profits for the next years. That is the only thing I think about wall street ownership of bitcoins. Wall street is well known for stock markets and traditional business corporate buildings. Bitcoin is new but I think they will also adopt blockchain soon.

It is not me. It was not me who brought forth the example of gold, so I was just following someone else's lead. But I agree that it doesn't matter as it might be the same with any other commodity out there. But not with Bitcoin


You don't get my point at all

It doesn't matter if Bakkt can legally reuse collateral and whether it is an accounting issue, even if they can and it is. You are missing the whole thing as it is not about believing but solid knowledge that the blockchain provides. No one is going to give a goddamn fuck about Bitcoin certificates unless there is a way to actually see if these certificates are backed by real coins, one by one. You can fool people with gold (or any other commodity) but Bitcoin is different

They will not hold is something other than they will not hold a lot. Most of the time wall street companies hold a big portion of everything they get into and they are used to having controlling piece in any given company and try to rule the company to the most profitable way rather than the best way. It means if they were to get into bitcoin they would want to have the most coins out there they could but that would increase the price so much that when they want to sell it would create a huge problem.

When you want to buy bitcoin its always lovely and you can even buy OTC at any price you want at any time you want because its easy to find people who are willing to sell you bitcoins, there are always people who are willing to sell bitcoins and even if you can't find the right amount you can buy from thousand different people.

However, if you own 5 billion dollar worth of bitcoin how are you going to sell them ? It is impossible and its hard to find people to buy from that price as well.

some here are saying that wall street institutions will not buy any bitcoin is crazy talk. i agree they will make more trading futures or derivitives etc. but to say they will not take an actual position in digital btc is asinine. goto finance.yahoo.com. pick out a garbage stock that is trading on the nasdaq or nyse, click on the "major holders" and you will see at least one major institution has a position in it. So to say that wall street will not buy and hold btc is ridiculous. They take positions in everything just to have a position, regardless if its a sure thing or is a million to one long shot. Money is no object. Only time will tell how many they actually hold, but I dont think this will ever come to light until their bags are full.

That's what I've been thinking myself

And since the Wall Street "collective" (or criminals) can easily buy up all bitcoins out there (at current prices) and do that many times if they choose so, they are not interested in Bitcoin unless, as you rightfully assume, they inflate the Bitcoin derivatives market, which would be orders of magnitude greater than the spot market. But that would be equal to destroying Bitcoin if we assume they can actually do that in the first place (which is not given or certain)

That's exactly what I was thinking.  The Wall Street collective has enough cash to buy all the bitcoin in existence several times over--and they can't do that without driving up the price while buying, or down while selling.  The only viable solution for them is to bet on the futures markets, just like they do with other currencies & commodities. 

That said, I don't know precisely what's available for crypto derivatives right now.  That's an area where only the big dogs play and that doesn't include me.  I'm just hoping that Wall Street doesn't somehow fuck everything up like they did in 2008.  Could happen.

They are definitely interested in anything that can make them money but they are not interested in investing in the market as it is, they are creating their own infrastructure so they can manipulate the price as they want, this is why I do not like bitcoin futures since they will be capable of manipulating the price of bitcoin without actually buying any.

again, you're fixating on gold for some reason, but rehypothecation is common practice with virtually all commodities and securities that trade on wall street.


no, that's not the issue. the issue is that fractional reserve is legal. the amount of gold held in the JPM vaults gets periodically inspected by the CFTC staff---doesn't mean there's enough to back the market.

so firstly, in CFTC-regulated futures markets, contract volumes don't need to be fully backed by the underlying. the bitcoin blockchain doesn't help when CFTC rules don't give a shit about bitcoin's hard cap on supply.

secondly, you're only considering hypothecation (the original pledge of collateral). you keep ignoring the actual issue which is re-hypothecation, where bakkt can legally reuse collateral posted by their clients. this is purely an accounting issue. none of these transactions are happening on the blockchain---it's purely offchain based on collateral held in bakkt's vault.

what exactly are you or regulators going to "check" on the blockchain? the problem occurs when multiple different firms believe they have ownership of the same bitcoin (held in bakkt's vaults). this has the ultimate effect of reducing demand. when it only takes one physical bitcoin to create multiple paper bitcoins, it can absorb a lot more demand than the spot market.

They already did that. A lot of people sold their bitcoins at a loss. Those threads of hope are made by people itching to sell.

This bear market started right on the first day after CME had opened its futures markets to bitcoin. The question now is if this bear market will follow like the last one (in a four-year cycle), or if it will endure for more time (like it happened with precious metals, for instance). In the first case, it means the miners and the old whales are still in control. In the second case, it means that Wall Street is in control.

For now, the price is back to what it was before October 2017.

I think maybe a handful of institutions have put like 0.001% into bitcoin. I'm talking about what happens when they actually have Wall St approved exchanges and financial products for bitcoin opened up and they can legally allow clients to buy bitcoin through regulated wall st exchanges. Whatever money they have in it now is nothing compared to what they will put in it once all that is set up.

Wall St is very skeptical of bitcoin, which there are only a handful of bitcoin related things even announced at this point. It will probably take a few years for them to slowly step in. Right now they no doubt have a microscopic amount in bitcoin compared to what they will once they get regulated exchanges and products online and once they've started to tiptoe in and realize the world didn't end from them letting their clients buy bitcoin.

Sure some wealthy people have been investing in bitcoin, but i'm talking about the tens of trillions of dollars under management by institutional players. None of that has gone into bitcoin yet because there isn't any legal way for them to do it until regulated exchanges and products run by Wall St companies come online, which is what is starting this year.

If they are in tears, then they should be

If they suffered severe loses, these people should be waiting for Bakkt as it might be their only chance to break even in the nearest future. That likely explains the attitude and words of the commissioner from the SEC. He might have bought a couple of bitcoins near or at the top and now he is deep in the red territory. If Bitcoin continues to magnate, we are going to see more voicing their stance and probable participation

Probably won't matter much, and probably it will come down to them not actually owning much. Because it's one thing to say that you've got funds, stocks, shares, ETF, futures contracts that show you're invested in Bitcoin, but quite another to say that you actually control the private keys to the bitcoin.

You think people are seriously waiting with bated breath for Bakkt? You think Sachs employees, nasdaq etc haven't already tiptoed into Bitcoin? They probably started years ago. Private equity began Bitcoin investments as early as 2014, and by 2016 every PE worth its weight was scrambling into crypto. They're probably all in tears now along with crypto funds, unless they capitalised at ATH (of course they didn't).

Not too much, bitcoin is a limited thing and its finite, if they want to buy too much of it the price would increase a lot and they would not be profiting from it. They do not want to buy bitcoin at a 20k+ price because the price could drop anytime and if they want to buy a lot of bitcoin than there is no other way than increase the price. That is the good part of bitcoin, its finite and since its finite there will never be anyone who buy too much of it, if they collected it before bitcoin became famous than they already did but from now on they can't do it since it would affect the price badly for them.

Wall street has a lot of money but they didn't become that rich by just putting their money on everything and just wait for the profit, they are smart and know how this is run so they won't do it neither.

investors can see the opportunity of falling bitcoin prices and they use that moment as well as possible to be able to buy as much bitcoin as they can by utilizing many people who panic it will only make investors able to get a lot of profits.

It is possible, indeed

But you are looking at it without taking into consideration the difference between gold and Bitcoin. Fractional reserve is possible with gold (as well as everything else) because there is no definitive way to check whether gold certificates (I intentionally avoid using the term paper gold here) are (not) backed up by gold (think of it as exploiting the benefit of doubt). This is not the case with Bitcoin, and that's the point which you seem to deliberately ignore as it is not the first time I point it out

If they bought in October 2017 and they are not sold in December 2017-January 2018, then I think right now, they are loss big money because now bitcoin price is down too deep. And if they still have bitcoin, they must hold tight the bitcoin until the price can increase more than $15k so they can sell and get those profit. I don't know how much bitcoin Wall Street have because we don't know if they get involved in bitcoin too or not. But I think they are right now using this chance to buy as much bitcoin as they can.

I doubt they own very much yet. I'm sure a very small number of institutions own a small amount of bitcoin, but I'd say its like 1% of what they might end up buying in the next couple of years.

Yeah, they own a lot and I think they started to adopt early that year, and for sure they invest more during the dumped moment of cryptomarket. Well, they will create money if they continue to support bitcoin. It looks like they are serious on this one, let's see their plan later on.

you're just reading from their PR material.

they can make money playing it straight. they can make a lot more money using fractional reserve, and they can do it legally too.

why do you guys think that's so impossible? why would you assume legacy institutions like ICE have the best of intentions and want to give away potential profits? just because "they believe in bitcoin"? lol, i'm not that gullible.

BAKKT put lots of emphasis in their announcements on not explicitly allowing leverage, but they carefully avoided questions about commingling and rehypothecation. people have been pleading with both them and regulators to address bitcoin rehypothecation but BAKKT has been completely silent on the issue. why do you think that is?

BAKKT has said they want to spread the *USAGE* of bitcoin and help it become a globally adopted currency. So despite what you say, it seems there primary interest is in helping bitcoin (not fake paper bitcoin bets) become adopted - and of course make money off the proliferation of bitcoin by getting in as one of the very first sources of bitcoin investments on wall st.

They will earn much less than they will negotiate.

They will probably Fractional reserve banking with bitcoin

right, which is how gold certificates work.

BAKKT has absolutely not said they won't engage in rehypothecation practices, which means applying fractional reserve practices to underlying borrowed collateral. of course they will---that's how central counterparties (like BAKKT) make their money.

this is how all wall street markets work. why would it be any different for bitcoin?


cash settled markets deliver USD at settlement time. under no circumstances could an investor treat them as bitcoins because after maturity, these contracts have no relationship to bitcoin at all. if you ever want real bitcoins, you could never accumulate them from these markets.

paper bitcoin markets allow settlement/conversion to bitcoin, meaning investors will treat them like bitcoins. this is much like how traders treat USDT like USD all the while wondering if the USDT is truly backed. we should assume not all paper bitcoins are truly backed because wall street openly and legally engages in collateral rehypothecation: a single underlying bitcoin can be pledged to several different borrowers as paper bitcoins. this is fully legal and it's likely part of BAKKT's business model.

Wall street isn't one entity. I'm sure that there is a wide variety of institutions owning a decent number of Bitcoin, but it's all relative with how it very likely doesn't even account for 1% of their risk allocation.

If they up that to 5% in the coming few years it would be a major step forward, but then again, there are enough people here who don't see that as a step forward. We'll see where this goes, but they are here whether people like it or not.

I'm however sure that we'll be seeing a whole lot more cash settled instruments in the coming years, and this will obviously make sure that there is less spot demand. For investors there is no difference, they just look for exposure.

Yeah exactly, he is wrong about BAKKT. BAKKT will be bakking up (sorry i couldn't help it  ) every futures contract with real bitcoin. They will be buying up tons of bitcoin. The people in charge of BAKKT have specifically said they want to promote bitcoin and help it become a global asset and payment method, which obviously fake/paper bitcoin products would do nothing for.

Fidelity is making an institutional grade custody solution - which is for Wall St to actually store their real bitcoin. And of course other companies like Coinbase have been attempting to provide this for Wall St as well.

I guess sure its possible Wall St will just make pretend financial products based on bitcoin's price and only a little bit of Wall St money will go into actual bitcoin, but I think it is gonna be a bit of both. And then you've got stuff like an physically backed ETFs that everyday people could put in their retirement account which will also tie up lots of bitcoin supply.
Maybe Wall St won't drive the price up to $100k all by themselves, but it seems clear over the coming years they will tie up a good amount of bitcoin and will be part of the equation as bitcoin continues to rocket upwards in price over the long haul.

Once these "Wall St approved" custody solutions are ready, any financial advisor worth anything at all should be telling any average person saving for retirement they better buy at least one bitcoin (just a few thousand dollars) now before the price gets too high. Not saying that's gonna happen, maybe by the time it happens they'll be telling them to buy at least a tenth of a bitcoin cuz prices will have risen too much, but I can definitely see Bitcoin being a normal small part of your average retirement account, and of course the average rich person getting advised that they should invest at least a few hundred thousand dollars into Bitcoin. I think once these Wall St services come online over the next year we'll see a shift to wear Wall St people start accepting Bitcoin as a normal small part of their portfolios and that could take up millions of the bitcoin supply right there.

I think we should clarify things at this point

As I got it, you are talking about paper bitcoins which don't have their back up in the form of real bitcoins ("you'll see bitcoins effectively being printed out of thin air"). But as far as I'm informed, this is not what BAKKT is going to do in practice. Basically, they are going to issue Bitcoin certificates, which are to confirm that they actually have a certain amount of bitcoins in their custody. Obviously, these are two entirely different situations (the first being essentially the same as with cash-settled Bitcoin futures), so please clarify what you mean by paper bitcoins exactly

that is irrelevant. nobody is saying bitcoin = gold. gold is not the only commodity futures market that operates this way, and collateral rehypothecation is common across all institutional markets. gold is just one example of how wall street operates---high leverage speculation and fractional reserve collateralization.


then why is BAKKT creating them? why is citibank working on digital asset receipts? i assume it's because they think institutions will want to speculate with them.

if institutions want to enter the market but not custody their own coins due to risks involved, paper bitcoins would be an obvious solution. fidelity is also working on institutional custody btw.


cash settled are specifically not paper bitcoins. volume on those markets has also been steadily rising ever since launch so i wouldn't say there is zero interest either.

There must be interest in bitcoin to these wall street wolves.
They only care about money and know when there is blood in the street its the time to buy.
All of them live and die by the words of their god and savior warren buffett.

I don't think that's going to happen

Why? Because Bitcoin is not gold. Gold is a universally accepted store of value, proved and tested by time itself. In other words, you receive what you pay for, and it can't lose its value overnight. Bitcoin is different and adding another layer of volatility will definitely be over the top. So I don't think there will be a lot of interest in paper bitcoins. Did cash-settled Bitcoin futures 1.0 spark a lot of interest?

there's a distinct possibility that wall street won't pump the market like people think. when you look at commodity futures speculation on wall street, like the gold market, not many contracts are physically delivered. it's mostly speculative trading with profit/loss being rolled into the next contracts. when you combine that dynamic with regular wall street accounting practices (collateral rehypothecation = fractional reserve) then if wall street and the rest of the market consider BAKKT-custodied paper bitcoins as real bitcoins, you'll see bitcoins effectively being printed out of thin air.

as long as a trickle of real bitcoins flows in and out of BAKKT (like USD with tether), the market will rationally see paper bitcoins and real bitcoins as equivalent. just like the gold market.

It seems to me that you are asking wrong questions

For example, you should first ask (maybe, even ask yourself) why institutions and hedge funds would want to buy Bitcoin and with what purpose in mind. Right, there can be only one purpose that any of these entities can be looking for, and that is profit. They are in exclusively for earning profit. So far so good. But here comes a tricky part. Which is, how are they going to earn dough with Bitcoin exactly?

The only way you could earn profits in the cryptoworld is by buying low and selling high. So if they are going to buy up like 5M bitcoins, what are they going to do next? Keep it or maybe even hodl it? But these people want profits, they are not anywhere close to being a typical cryptocurrency bagholder. And now ask yourself whether they would be willing to become bagholders for us as this is the right question

Between 0 and 17 millions BTC  

So, how do you define what this "Wall Street" is, every investment fund in the country, every business located on Wall Street, every company listed on the NYSE?
I'm asking this because Fidelity is headquartered in Boston and is a non-indexed fund.

Anyhow, I find it pretty interesting this curiosity people have about how much coins others have
Of course, we are all about privacy, we always tell people not to brag about how many coins they have  ..but ..but..how many he has? , when did he buy? , at what price he sold....


The 3rd or the 8th?

How would it make people move out of the market (i assume you mean move away from bitcoin)??

It doesn't matter who owns bitcoin. You can't get ripped off by Wall St simply because they own a bunch of bitcoin. You still have your bitcoin and it has nothing to do with Wall St having Bitcoin. This will just take up supply meaning there is less for everyone else, meaning prices are higher.

They must be ahead of some of the firms, but yeah, no estimates would be safe to give. At most, Wall St. would surely just introduce bitcoin derivatives just like what they're doing with stocks right now. They wouldn't dive deeper than they could unless they are really sure on what they're doing. Also, if Wall St. alone takes a huge chunk of bitcoin in circulation, this will force people to move out of the market, and perhaps stay on other less controlled environments to prevent getting ripped off by Wall St. sharks.

Fidelity mined Bitcoin back in 2015, so it's way more likely that they were on board well before that. In other words, wall street is partly in already.

The very fact that they are setting up the infrastructure required to offer custody, trading desks, futures, etc, comes all down to them trying to make it more mainstream and have them earn tons of money in the process. They will outperform, perhaps even replace most of the current crypto exchanges in the future, and it's only a matter of time.

As far as the number of coins I believe wall street owns, I don't know and don't feel comfortable guessing. I can't back up saying they own 100,000BTC, and I can't back up saying they own at least 1,000,000BTC.

Hundreds of thousands. They began investing in October 2017.

Firms operating with collaboration with Wall Street market will engage into cryptocurrency investments. Already more firms and financial institutions have begun to start investing into bitcoin. As in the Op Bakkt, bitcoin futures, ETF approval all will give positive hope on the market recovery.

I think that Wall Street will buy ZERO bitcoins during the next few years.
They will make money out of bitcoin backed derivatives trading fees(if bitcoin futures trading ever gets green light).Wall Street is a market,not a company.They don't buy and sell,they let the traders buy and sell and they charge a fee for allowing them to use the platform.

Wall St should start tiptoeing into the bitcoin market this year with BAKKT, Fidelity, maybe goldman sachs, nasdaq, etc. In the next, let's say, 3 years how many Bitcoin do you think Wall St will buy up? This includes any financial product on Wall St, so I'm talking institutions and hedge funds buying it up, retail investors buying through ETFs, physical backed futures, etc. So any bitcoin bought through Wall St, since that will be a brand new market for bitcoin buyers.

Do you think they might buy up several million bitcoin over the next 3 years? If they buy in during the early part of the bull run, leaving the FOMOing masses to buy in higher, it would cost Wall St well under $100 billion to buy up a few million if they didn't wait too long, which is a small amount for Wall St as a whole. And what size effect on the price do you think it would cause if Wall St bought up say like 5 million bitcoin over the next two years?