boy those ETFs were the juice bitcoin really needed eh
from dgerard@awful.systems to buttcoin@awful.systems on 13 Jan 2024 00:42
https://awful.systems/post/837240
from dgerard@awful.systems to buttcoin@awful.systems on 13 Jan 2024 00:42
https://awful.systems/post/837240
that drop was one hour after the latest billion tethers
the new narrative is apparently that the pump is in 90 days when financial advisors are finally ready to push bitcoin ETFs on their customers (for some reason)
ETFs put bitcoin on steroids!! y’know, asthmatic with shrunken balls
the bitcoin market is fake and in tethers, but the retail securities market is real and in dollars
my brother in Satoshi, you are the exit liquidity
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I don’t understand how this could be failing. Before, if you wanted to buy shitcoins, you’d have to look for them individually and buy them one by one. Now with ETFs you can buy all the shitcoins all at once. What’s not to love? /s
Anyone who was stoked about this has no idea how ETFs work. This was one of the single worst things that could have been done to digital currency… and that is factoring in the exchanges and rampant fraud.
I have next to no idea how ETFs work. I just assumed it wouldn’t send people into a deflating bubble.
Care to share how it’s actually deflating the bubble faster?
I scrolled too far up and motherfucking Lemmy ate my fucking comment. Fuck this Web 2.0 garbage. You get a shorter reply, yay. Also I’m not re-linking everything; search Wikipedia for anything confusing, like “futures market” or “spot market” or “basket of goods.”
A commodity futures ETF is a way to improve the arbitrage that an individual investor experiences, while also reducing their exposure to spot markets. In particular, an investor only holds shares in a fund, and the fund does the actual trading; also, the fund only trades futures, although they do typically have a “basket” which holds physical commodities at a secure location.
For example, I hold shares of precious-metals ETFs. This means that, unlike e.g. somebody who has gold coins in their safe at home, I have to trust that the ETF managers will still exist tomorrow and that the financial system will still honor their contracts; this is technically increased risk. But in exchange, I don’t have to physically receive and store any precious metals, and also I get theoretically better returns due to the implicit arbitrage in futures markets.
Fun fact: BTC is overpriced, mostly from grifters and miners pumping and hyping the market. However, arbitrage sees overpriced commodities as an opportunity, and a futures ETF can produce value for its investors merely by insisting that the commodity should be valued less. This is also why the spot ETFs were not approved by SEC; the spot market for BTC is quite volatile and it’s not clear that a BTC spot trader would produce value for investors.
My intuition (and the sneer I wrote) is that basically crypto has historically been a free market of grift and fraud. Any attempts to launder or legitimise crypto trading via regulation and policing is just gonna drive the non-believing profiteers away. Is that anywhere close to the truth?
Yeah, that’s my take too.
Crypto has a “base utility” for illegal activity. Say the price for BTC based on that is 10% of the current inflated price. Integrating BTC into the traditional financial market would in the near term drive down the price closer to the “base price”, as well as closing off a number of avenues to add “dirty” money into the system.
yep. The bitcoin market is fake and priced in tethers, the securities market is real and priced in dollars. When the two collide, the vastly larger one with humorless regulators wins.
Last time I checked, which is a while back the institutional investors are putting less and less money into the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. Of course bitcoin != the wider ecosystem, and people are prob into bitcoin for the whole value thing and nothing more, but it is a bad sign. The wider cypherpunk dream is dead I’d say.
Who knows? It’s a classic “buy the rumour, sell the news” stock story though, so there’s something about human psychology right there.
BTC shills are always pushing for the next big thing that will pull the mass buyers in. ETFs were going to be it this time around. I suspect a lot of people were holding onto BTC / not selling into the recent run-up in the hope they were right. If it turns out that there’s no demand there’s an awful lot of selling pressure out there: Miners are holding a lot of stock & the halving that will halve their income is only a few weeks away.
My sister in law asked me, recently, “I heard Bitcoin is legal now? Is it a good time to buy?” “Nope.”
The integrity of our securities markets is a low bar if we’re being honest. Companies don’t trade on fundamentals these days. Nothing does, it’s all been turned into a casino by bad actors.
It may be a low bar, but it’s a bar most Bitcoin trading systems fail to clear. It’s obvious to everyone outside the bubble that there’s rampant insider trading and front-running on most exchanges. Heck, even the insiders know this and trade thereafter.
They didn’t even invent it.
Amazing how, when you zoom out, the whole 7-12 Jan thing looks a bit like a Bart. But I doubt it was an manufactured Bart as I don’t think many people would have shorted the ETF period.