Quote from: pitiflin on August 08, 2018, 11:51:04 PM

Quote from: exstasie on August 08, 2018, 11:33:41 PM

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.

How does it not eliminate the purpose of bitcoin? It eliminates the fact that bitcoin was supposed to be a peer to peer currency eliminating the usage of 3rd party intermediaries. ETF sucks and people need to understand that. Hell people even got scammed by such methods(through unofficial sources who were actually scammers).

Unfortunately at the moment I don't have a counter argument about the currency vs investment dilemma, good points made there. But the ETF thing, fuck that.

Seems like a language issue here. I was confused by your wording of "eliminate the purpose of bitcoin." ETF shares are just paper securities. They require trust, so of course they aren't a replacement for bitcoins. They aren't bitcoins. If that's all you're saying, I agree. That's why I said:

Quote

All we can do is preach the difference between real BTC and paper BTC.

It's just like people holding debt notes payable in gold vs. holding real gold bullion.... eventually, the counterparty trust will fuck people over. I get that.

I thought you were saying this had some relevance to the protocol. I think that was the confusion. It's completely 100% irrelevant. If ETF share buyers believe they are buying bitcoins, they are ignorant and may get screwed because of it. But I do think BTC securities are unavoidable (due to hype, deception and misunderstanding of Bitcoin), so as a community, we need to emphasize the difference between real bitcoins and fake securities.