Topic: Winkelvoss ETP could become THE pricing mechanism for BTC - page 4. (Read 15389 times)

I would tell my parents and siblings to buy the ETF over storing the Bitcoins themselves. This is exactly why I haven't advised all but one of my friends to buy Bitcoins (and he didn't ). The risks of them losing them are so much higher than the potential profit they might make.

With ETF's this problem doesn't exist and a Bitcoin ETF has the added benefit that the amount of Bitcoins underlying the fund can be proven at any given time preventing a discrepancy in price as with paper gold. Depending on the fees I might buy the ETF myself to insure for some total fuck up on my part

exactly THIS is the main problem.
we should not tell our daughters to buy into "this". we should teach them to deal with bitcoins directly.

trying to adopt bitcoin to be convenient as a sofa is a big mistake. then there will be no mind evolution, no financial revolution, nothing. anything stays where it is.

anyone who understands bitcoins true potential and designation, should try to go and develop "other" way, no matter how inconvenient it should be.

Personally, I find it hard to get excited about claims to have invented a whole new way of securing Bitcoins. To my mind, this is a bit like announcing you've developed a whole new way of securing text documents that contain the letter 'G': what is it about securing Bitcoins that is any different than securing any other piece of digital information? But who knows -- maybe they've come up with something really surprising!

In any case, if you buy the view that wherever the volume goes becomes the principal price discovery mechanism, then I suppose that any contribution made by the patent to attracting volume could in turn add to the effect.

There is knowledge I lack in almost all areas.  Believing one knows everything only assures one can learn nothing.  If assuming a modicum of humility in myself and others is in poor taste to you, then I can live with that.

But... in an attempt to return to the practice of discourse using assertions backed by evidence, rather than unbacked aspersions, I'll offer this bit from the WBT ETF S-1 along with a question:

"Proprietary Security System. The Sponsor has developed a proprietary security protocol for storing and safekeeping the Trust’s Bitcoins. Other ETPs may not utilize security systems that create similar redundancies and safeguards to protect against theft or loss."

It appears one of the mechanisms by which the Windlevoss IP LLC through the Sponsor (Math Based Assets) liberates the trust of its Bitcoin (below the starting .2 per share) is by seeking patent protection for methods of securing Bitcoin for which a patent license fee is extracted from the ETF.

"Winklevoss IP LLC is the owner of certain intellectual property relating to the patent-pending structure of the Trust and the Security System. Winklevoss IP LLC is licensing the use of such intellectual property to the Sponsor."

These are from page 39 of the S-1
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579346/000119312513279830/d562329ds1.htm

Is this legal protection against others attempting to similarly secure their Bitcoins a part of why the WBT ETF could become THE pricing mechanism of Bitcoin?  

Very sensible assumption.

Which I "now admit"? I reminded folks of this very fact on a separate discussion thread (here and here) over two weeks ago...


And my use of a metaphor doesn't seem like a particularly good rationale for insinuating that I am somehow insulting someone's intelligence -- yours or anyone else's. If I failed to anticipate how you or anyone else might take a throwaway comment as a personal insult, then my bad. However, exploiting my failure to anticipate your misinterpretation as an opportunity for a condescending restatement of the obvious -- namely, that all of us, including me, are lacking knowledge in almost all areas -- seems in remarkably poor taste.

Yes, it is similar to most ETF.  Many here are not your typical ETF investor and not all ETF investor are aware of how they work.  Some were surprised and shocked to learn about the decreasing amount of bitcoin per share which you now admit is normal.  Learning new knowledge is no reason to insult someone's intelligence or to accuse them of magical marshmallow thinking.  We all like to learn and there might even be some things that they know and that you don't know.  Be kind.

The declining bitcoin per share is not replaced with magic marshmallows, it is replaced with nothing.

My half formed idea is that the rise in the value of bitcoin will outpace the drain from the administrative fees, and that opinion leads me to consider it for a higher risk part of my retirement account.  I am assuming that this increase in bitcoin value will translate to more wealth after retirement.

It's like any ETF: the fees are only worth paying if you place a value higher than the fees on whatever benefits the ETF might be offering. In this particular case, some people might like the liquidity, some people might like being able to hold it in a brokerage account, some people might like to hold it in a retirement account where the funds are otherwise unavailable to them, etc. For many people who are already fully capable of buying Bitcoins directly, I don't think there's much advantage at all.

I have read and do review the filing.  I wish I had thought of it, but I am also like a student who has read the text and knows the words but doesn't grok it.

How can I tell my daughter why it is a good idea to buy into this when a mechanism is visible to remove value, and none is visible to increase it?

I don't imagine that something like a reverse split would be unheard of, but on the other hand it wouldn't really have any impact on a commodity ETF except to increase the price per share.

Full details on the mechanics are available from the S-1 filing.

Does a mechanism exist to increase the number of bitcoins per share?

Of course the NAV, denominated in Bitcoins, is publicly known; unless the NAV of a commodity ETF is publicly known, nobody is going to want to buy it.

As for any preconditions on being the pricing mechanism for Bitcoins, it's important not to get the cart before the horse. The suggestion of the article is that the trust's becoming the principal price discovery mechanism for Bitcoin vs. the dollar will be an outcome of its introduction, not something which has to be deemed, decided, stipulated, or dictated by anyone. In other words, I'm not saying that we or anyone else should make it the principal price discovery mechanism, I'm saying that when you set up something which provides high levels of liquidity, low barriers to trading, and introduces the future likelihood of standardized options trading on the underlying ETF, it is highly likely that as a result, it will wind up becoming the principal way in which price gets discovered.

Also, on the whole "backed by Bitcoin" issue, as it relates to the proposed Winkelvoss trust, I wondered whether it might help to highlight one way in which commodity ETFs do not work: they do not issue shares with a face value denominated in units of the commodity. Rather, they simply issue shares which represent a proportional ownership of the commodity being held by the ETF.

In the case of the Bitcoin trust we're talking about, buying a share does not mean you're buying something initially representing .2 Bitcoins, where the trust then gradually, over time, starts magicking away little chunks of those Bitcoins and replacing them with fluffy white marshmallows. The shares represent a proportional interest in whatever the Bitcoins the trust actually holds. Of course the Bitcoins held per share will decline over time due to expenses; every investor knows this, in advance, and the Net Asset Value of such ETFs is always public knowledge. But that does not mean the shares somehow become less backed by Bitcoins: they are always and forever backed by the Bitcoins being held by the trust.

Just in case folks from this topic might be interested, I've created a separate topic over in the general Bitcoin discussion section on a separate article from the beginning of this month called In the Bitcoin Economy, Anonymity and Privacy are Not the Same Thing. It suggests that there are important differences between the two, and that it's wrong to think that if you take care of the anonymity, the privacy will take care of itself. I'd welcome any comments, thoughts, etc.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-focusing-on-anonymity-over-privacy-holding-back-bitcoin-257734

agree, to be short.
longer version: i agreed, that each of anonymity and privacy are valuable, just added freedom to the list and forgotten to exclude anarchy

btw, this grows as a huge off-topic here...
if on the forum is some art of philosophical board or such, we will be welcome there

There isn't enough freedom for truly free speech which is why people have to settle for anonymous speech. Anonymous speech is valuable in a certain context, I don't have to know exactly who holds certain views to find it valuable to know a lot of people hold certain views. If we don't have free speech then it's less likely we can know the true views of anyone, and without anonymity at least on the Internet we would not have any way of holding certain conversations on certain topics because it would be impossible for people to have an honest and open discussion.

For this reason we still need anonymous discussion. That is not the same thing as anonymous complaints. Discussion is the ability of people to share their thoughts without consequence (we need this), but complaints which can cost a person their career or send people to jail is free speech with consequences. Direct consequences should bring direct accountability to whoever made the complaint in some form or another even if just to let us determine that their evidence is bogus and their facts are false. Pseudo-anonymous gives us an alias or ID to allow us to do that.

must say here that anonymity only allows free speech in a distorted society, but FREEDOM allows free speech in general.


good point.
unfortunately both anonymity AND confidentiality are under the threat these days

I agree with what you're saying and I have some thoughts.

Evaluation isn't merely speech, but requires discernment and judgment. If you're going to make a qualitative judgment then it is more like voting and I agree that should not be completely anonymous. The way it should be is that the professor in question shouldn't know which student voted which way, but the *computer system* itself could know. Access controls could be put in place so that the professor does not know. In fact no specific person would have to know until there is a dispute and a valid reason for access, but the *computer system* should always know.

For example if you look at it like pulling scrambled identities out of a hat and seeing which way each one voted, I think this is completely fair. You could get the polling information, and it could be pseud-anonymous in that only the computer would know, but there would also be accountability because if something goes wrong it could be unscrambled rather easily. I don't think the professor needs to know how each specific student voted. I don't think a human being has to constantly monitor it, but only act as an arbitrator. In a dispute the arbitrator should be given access to the identities.

I understand also that complaints should not be truly anonymous. A complaint is once again something which is a qualitative judgment which has a cost/risk to the individual being judged. I do think that the person being judged doesn't always have to know they are being evaluated, but I also think that if they are evaluated the people who evaluated them must be known by a third party. So I don't advocate a black box, I advocate a grey box where you can put your vote into it and have the ability to voice your concerns. without your boss, professor, or whomever knowing exactly who you are. This does not mean the computer system should not know who you are. It should always know who everyone is.

To reverse it for example let's say the professor really is corrupt and students need a way to report this corruption, there should be an pseudo-anonymous channel to allow them to report this. In this case they would be considered an anonymous-source. However this can be made pseudo-anonymous by attaching a digital signature, so that now they have an alias and are not truly anonymous but pseudo-anonymous and their reputation can now be mapped. If they give bogus reviews under their pseudo-identity then the computer would know this and since they have to be a legit student to have a pseudo-identity the computer could revoke their ability to give reviews if it is found out that they are abusing it. The professor does not have to know which student said what, the professor could dispute that the student giving that bad review is biased and the computer system can look up a history of reviews to find out if the student is biased or not.

It's really no different from Ebay or Amazon. The reviewer should be reviewed by the system and held accountable, and the people being reviewed should be reviewed by the system and held accountable. Unreliable pseudo-anonymous sources will be flagged and labeled as such. Reliable pseudo-anonymous sources will be flagged and labeled as such.

If I'm the professor being reviewed I just want to know I'm reviewed by people who are honest, competent, reliable and as unbiased as possible. Anyone can smear me pseudo-anonymously, but it's a lot less likely that people who don't have a history of doing that will choose me out to smear, and if that did happen there would still be patterns which could reveal sub terranean network organization. If I'm a reviewer I don't see why my reviews could not also be pseudo-anonymously peer reviewed.

Thank you for your post. You've made me think.

I advocated for anonymous student evaluations back in the early '70s.  What we have found is that anonymity allows irresponsible evaluations.  Anyone who has been divorced and had anonymous child abuse complaints made understands this process as well.

Confidentiality, which would mean the professor doesn't know who wrote the evaluation, but someone does, gives a much better balance of rights.