Quote from: discopete on July 03, 2013, 08:53:41 PM

i have to agree.. this was my first thought when i saw the article too
a 200k sell on the current market would drive the price down but by doing it this way and creating demand from a new market if enough people bite it'll drive the price up just long enough for them to have turned all their BTC into cash

Nonsense. You do realize that registration, approval, underwriting, listing, and pre-IPO process is measured in month lots of months.

200K BTC over 6 months is 1,800 per day.
200K BTC over a year is 547 per day.

Far easier to just sell a "small" on the market each day then go through all this process plus you gain the added advantage of selling over a period of time and getting capital back quicker rather than waiting 6-12 months and selling it all at once (at potentially a much lower price).

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their 'company' will then be able to pay them wages/dividends and generally bleed down the value of BTC whilst only they benefit from it. it's a clever piece of latteral thinking, but not a good thing for a technology whose best outcome would be it stabalised into a currency

I mean it is that hard to actually read the S-1 (publicly released). It isn't a company it is an ETF and the Bitcoins are held by a trust. 0.2 BTC per share issued. The trust can't spend any of those Bitcoins not a single Saotshi for anything... ever. The trust simply keeps 0.2 BTC * the # of shares outstanding. Nothing more, nothing less.

The sponsor (a company which is NOT going public) can charge a management fee but usually these are something like 0.4% so we are talking decades before any significant fraction of the coins in trust are "paid out".

The ETF may be a bad idea, it may not ever get approved, it might be downright silly but it would be the absolute worst possible way to sell 200K BTC. I can't possibly think of a method with more cost, more legal complications, more chance of failure, more risk, and require more time.