Bitcoin reached 20k last year without an ETF. All this hype and talk about the ETF is so overblown, cryptocurency doesn't need it , we are backed by the people.
But then it collapsed due to nothing, and it likely only kept rising due to manipulation, or at the very least all the FOMO from new investors.The market is fickle, but the ETF will at least temporarily cause some excitement and a flurry of new money coming in and that's what we could do with right now even if it's only short lived.
That's got to be from the futures contracts. As soon as they introduced those, half the investing world took short positions on the coin. And then it started to falter...
I think that all of these investment tools are just going to cause more headaches for bitcoin users. Especially if they want to start using a fractional reserve system and start borrowing against the coin for commerce. Bitcoin needs to have a decentralized system of exchange, and all of these other things are not going to help to keep that decentralization.