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Comment by STRML | Hacker News Reader

We've been watching the ETF with interest. To gauge market sentiment, we launched an ETF approval binary contract (https://www.bitmex.com/app/trade/COIN_BH17). COIN_BH17 saw a jump from 35% to nearly 50% today. Optimism on the ETF is rising.

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Even as a long-time holder of bitcoin, I don't see how the Coin ETF will be approved. There is so much risk in the ETF that your investment may be wiped out instantly. I wouldn't approve it.

My expectation is that it will be rejected, and the price of bitcoin will crash back to about USD$700 or so, and continue its long march upwards. It's important to recognize that that crash would still mean that bitcoin has almost doubled in value vs the US dollar in the past year. It has doubled in value over the past six months.

That's not the metric by which ETFs are approved or denied.

I'd say the risk of a fork of the thing that you're supposedly tracking, such that you might not even know what you are tracking anymore, is a serious risk that the SEC would consider to be a problem.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for it to be approved. But for that reason, I don't think it will be.

A fork could definitely cause some temporary confusion, but wouldn't an ETF just be tracking the sum of the value of the forks? At some point they'd need to pick a side, but in the meantime they could just buy/sell equal amounts of the forked currencies. Once they do pick a side they could either sell the other side of the fork, or allow withdrawals (like Coinbase, etc did with ETC).

As long as the rules are laid out ahead of time I'm not sure why the SEC would object.

That is something they would consider.

etfs own the underlying stock. if the ETF bitcoins are lost or stolen, the ETF is worth zero. stocks cannot just vanissh like bitcoins can

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