I believe there must be lots of ways for institutions and companies to hide it: special purpose vehicles, subsidiaries, offshore accounts and companies, hiring agents, etc
I don't particularly disagree with this point
As it may or may not be true. If anything, let's assume for a moment that it is and institutions as well as companies hide their investments in cryptocurrencies. But then we won't know that, right? Therefore, their well-concealed investments don't mean a thing to us as we would still be dreaming of the times when institutional money would come to market, even though it has likely already been there for quite some time (as per our assumption)
Each institution has its own financial audit, so they will not be able to hide the wealth they get from the audit, unless the director of the institution intends to corrupt, they have to work together to hide some of their finances, and save it in bitcoin, that's possible
I guess there might be workarounds (loopholes or whatever)
But technically, you should not ask me or question my point as this is not what I came up with here. I know that the public institutions (e.g. pension funds and their likes) are allowed only to invest in certain assets, i.e. the classes of assets which are explicitly listed in their investment declaration (or what it is called). Indeed, private institutions are a completely different animal, but then we may never know what they are investing in unless they intentionally make it known to the wider public (read, they want us to believe in something)
I believe there must be lots of ways for institutions and companies to hide it: special purpose vehicles, subsidiaries, offshore accounts and companies, hiring agents, etc
This is the post (and the poster) which you should focus your attention on
I cannot disagree with one of your points deisik that we cannot really have confidence in knowing the degree to which certain institutions might already be investing in bitcoin, and even if there are various degrees of public disclosure requirements of companies, we still might not know.
I, personally, nonetheless would presume that the degree that institutions are acquiring and investing in bitcoin to b relatively low and small. I am basing my speculation on what I understand about institutions, whether publicly held or privately held and I would even consider governmental into the category of possible institutions that engage in varying practices regarding their public openness.
In other words, there are likely some institutions that are secretly acquiring and HODLing bitcoin, but their quantity of held bitcoin remains low and the number of them doing it remains very low too - otherwise we would witness even higher bitcoin prices than we see today. But in the end, we are engaging in a decent amount of stabbing in the dark regarding our speculation, and seems to be the reason for this thread.