This sensational fuss over the ETF is borderline lunacy. It's just another reason to jerk the price around and stop out everyone who hid under the 7000 level or wherever. I'm getting sick and tired of these 30,000 by Dec / 50,000 by Oct / 100,000,000 by 2020 forecasts. How in the hell can anyone have a true idea of what the coin's value is going to be if there are no fundamental values to base a judgement on? Forecasters have a hard enough time doing it even when the values do exist.
This dip is just another good reason to hang on and chill out. It's not the doom, and the ETF isn't the future.
ETF is crap. Bitcoin was created to be a mainstream currency and not to be a main stream investment(which I am afraid it already has). ETF eliminates the purpose of bitcoin. So fuck that shit.
I think the securitization of Bitcoin is bad news all around. It doesn't
eliminate the purpose of Bitcoin, but it distracts from it. The protocol/network keeps chugging along no matter what. You won't see me treating ETF shares as sound money. It's paper based on trust.
But the problem is that society bows so heavily to authority. People will trust (and some Bitcoin folks around here already do trust) that "paper backing" is as good as real bitcoins. But this is inevitable. It's really not much different than counterfeiting coins in the traditional sense. Most people simply trust legal face value.
Re: the currency vs. investment dilemma: I think Bitcoin was created to be
sound money. Money is only an
investment insofar as Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good"). As long as our economies are dominated by freely printed and debased currencies, people will
invest in BTC. There's no way around that.
So I guess we should expect these slimy derivative products to come to market as well. All we can do is preach the difference between real BTC and paper BTC.