Quote from: User705 on January 14, 2015, 09:53:27 PM

Quote from: outahere on January 14, 2015, 09:46:26 PM

Quote from: User705 on January 14, 2015, 09:43:49 PM

And that assumes an honest market which now that Wall Street is involved is anybodies guess.

Wait, what?!? How is Wall Street involved in Bitcoin?

Yep my mistake. There is no Winkelvoss coin etf. No syndicates. No Pantera. No Second Market. No BIT. No Tim Draper. And of course all those people with money and connections have no influence at exchanges. The regular stock market is full of fail to deliver and shorts without actual borrowed shares. But that could never happen to bitcoin. You're right.

The Winkelvoss COIN ETF is only a request to the SEC so far. Approval is by no means guaranteed.

The syndicates for the USMS auctions grouped small investors who could not afford to buy 2000 BTC by themselves. That is not Wall Street.

Pantera is a venture capital firm, that provides investments on the order of 10 million dollars to startup firms that may or may not prosper.

SecondMarket is a financial firm that specializes in non-standard instruments, such as pre-IPO equities. Its only involvements with bitcoins were the organization of syndicates for the USMS auctions (it collected 1% fee from the second one) and the BIT fund.

SecondMarket's BIT fund is an investment fund backed by bitcoins, that is not openly traded; clients buy shares from the BIT management company (a subsidiary of SecondMarket), and can withdraw only by selling those shares back to the company. It owns ~135'000 BTC that are in theory deposited by its clients It has collected maybe 60 million dollars of since Sep/2013, but since the nominal price of its shares is tied to that of BTC, its assets are now worth only ~25 million USD. Since Oct/2104 it has suspended redemptions (withdrawals).

Pantera has a similar bitcoin fund, PBP, but I don't know its numbers. There are a few other bitcoin funds out there. I doubt that they together got as much investment as SMBIT.

Tim Draper bought ~30'000 coins at ~600 USD/BTC, and another 2000 at ~350 USD/BTC, total ~19 million USD.

All those amounts are small change by Wall Street standards. One million dollars is the price of a median house in many US or European cities.