Everyone’s excited now, we’ve got yet another would-be exchange-traded fund. VanEck, a firm which has been actively trying to create a Bitcoin ETF for a long time, decided to build something far short of it: something a lot like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. But it’s being marketed and written about as a “mini” ETF.
In case you’re not aware, an ETF is a thing that some traders get excited about.
What an ETF does is track the performance of a whole market.
Fake Volume and Fake Bitcoiners Mean Crypto Stays Rebellious
In the case of Bitcoin, that means a lot – as much as 95% – of the data used to inform the charts and figures will be falsified. Which is the concern of regulators who have yet to approve an ETF.
A counter-argument will probably include talk of how corrupt and fake the fiat markets are. In many cases, that’s perfectly true.
It’s not relevant.
Crypto is the kind of community that not only passively allows firms like Bitfinex to pollute our markets with abject corruption, but we also talk about it pretty loudly. That’s going to slow down any sort of regulatory stamp of approval.
One thing we know for certain: you can’t rely on the volume statistics advanced by most exchanges. Never pick an exchange based on its reported or objectively reported volume.
Only a few exchanges see no need to lie, according to prior research.
Exchanges launch all the time, reporting fake volume and other statistics. Another tactic they use is posting a higher Bitcoin price. This attracts users who are looking to trade with an advantage, and sometimes the arbitrage makes sense. But just as often, withdrawals take a long time or never actually happen.
Exchanges close all the time, too.
Mt. Gox to Bitfinex: Are Traditional Products What We Came For, Anyway?
It’s a widely unregulated industry.
Market manipulation is real. The extent of it is all we don’t know. Have you ever heard the Whale Club? These are the Bitfinex people, long before the New York government was on their ass, talking about how they rule the BTC markets:
More audio here.
As far as volume faking goes, one estimate puts the figure at 95% of all reported volume. Crazy, right?
It’s also exactly the reason we probably never will have a Bitcoin ETF.
But I submit to you that it won’t make a difference if we have a variety of ETFs and other traditional financial products run on BTC or not. Such things don’t make people suddenly care about the sovereignty of their funds.
People aren’t just going to start using BTC because they can now pick it as an obscure trading option for their IRA, or whatever. None of that matters at all, not for mainstream adoption.
We need user-friendly products that make people excited to be their own bank, or something. And that's the type of thing we should be thinking about at Woodcoin.
It’s a special type of asshole that gets truly excited about things like this, and he’s probably the kind we need to watch out for: the clever Bitcoin professional.
