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I think most people don't consider bitcoin a currency, but some sort of asset, I think in japan is seen as a property. The point is, governments are going whatever they want about it.
If it's of any use, there is this chart comparative with bitcoin and gold when it introduced the ETF, it seems similar:
Japan is like the iconic country that actually sees bitcoin as a currency (aka a legal way of payment as they put it). and i am not talking about governments and what they see in bitcoin, but instead about what bitcoin really is.
you can't use that chart because bitcoin and gold have nothing in common to begin with and also because the scale of that chart is manipulated. bitcoin's chart is for less than 10 years while gold is for more than 50! besides bitcoin isn't rising because of some ETF, but it is rising because it is a global decentralized payment system that nobody can censor.
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But I reckon bitcoin is almost not treated as a currency but more as an investment in a digital gold type of asset. Agreed that it might bring more manipulation but it is already manipulated nevertheless.
ETFs and other derivatives brought gold to be a $7 trillion market, why do you reckon will it not bring the same to bitcoin?
the problem with seeing bitcoin as an investment not a currency is that it becomes worthless if you do that! in other words if you remove the currency aspect then you are left with some numbers in a database which you are trading virtually.
when you think about ETF and gold you can clearly see the benefit of it. because without things such as ETF if you wanted to buy gold as an investment you had to also dedicate a space in your garage for storing this gold! now with ETF you are buying gold without needing to store it. but it is not the same with bitcoin! you can store $0.01 or $100 million on a piece of paper alike. so you don't need ETF and that can only bring the manipulation part of it in the market instead. not to mention that many of the proposals don't even have to be backed by actual bitcoins!
ETF gold is not that different from ETF bitcoin if you think about it. Sure, the most obvious reason for an ETF for gold to exist is the fact that storing gold is cumbersome, specially for big multi millionaire investors.
But now think about it: With an ETF for bitcoin, people that want exposure to bitcoin but don't want to learn and stress about securing it themselves would use the ETF to delegate the task.
Actually it's exactly the same. With both gold and bitcoin the point is to own and secure it yourself, but not everyone thinks the same. Any decent ETF will be backed by the underlying so fractional reserve is not possible. Actually there's higher risk of that with gold than BTC which is strictly limited in amount and cryptographically secured at all times. With gold supply is unknown.
The conclusion is:
1) We cannot avoid governments releasing ETF's
2) If the ETF is decent, it will be bitcoin backed, which means super bullish