What is a Bitcoin spot ETF?#
Is an asset that tracks the price of Bitcoin.
Why is it considered a game changer?#
Institutional investors and wealthy individuals, using large investment firms like Blackrock, Fidelity or Ark among others, will be able to acquire the asset with low risk, since these investment firms are highly regulated. These investors have above 15 trillion dollars invested in these large firms and therefore, it is expected that these firms will allocate at least 1% of their portfolios to it. That will be mean a minimum of $150 billions into Bitcoin, which is remarkable considering the current market cap of the asset is currently $570 billion.
An injection of minimum $150 billions translates in a huge demand for Bitcoin with massive potential for price appreciation.
Current mayor players#
Until now, very few large institutions have acquired Bitcoin, examples are Tesla Inc (Nasdaq: TSLA) and Microstrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), which wrote a document labeled "A summary of some of the key considerations for corporations to keep in mind when investing in bitcoin". The link to the document:
Let's check the math#
Amount of Bitcoins mined per day:
Bitcoins mined per block: 6.25
Time in minutes to mine one block (approx): 10
Minutes in one day: 1440
Blocks mined per day: 144 -> (1440 / 10 = 144)
Bitcoins mined per day: 900 -> ( 144 x 6.25 = 900)
After the halving, since the Bitcoins mined per block will be reduced to 3.125, we will only have 450 mined per day.
*Bitcoins available for trading*:
- Around 4 million across exchanges
- 900 per day injected in the market
Assumptions#
- Miners are selling all 900 freshly mined Bitcoins
- Financial institutions will allocate at least 1% of their portfolio into Bitcoin
Assuming Miners sell all 900 every day (which is worst case scenario), this means, that in order for the price of Bitcoin to keep the current price (around $29.4K as I write this article), $26.5 millions are needed in the market to buy those 900 fresh mined every day, $795 million per month, $9.54 billion per year.
Projections in price appreciation#
Bear in mind that the projection can't be linear since there are many additional variables to factor in, specially qualitative non quantifiable ones as potential financial crisis, absurd regulations, more ETF delays, governments corruption, wars, pandemics, etc...
In terms of price appreciation, a 15X is plausible, which would rocket the price of Bitcoin to around $441K as soon as the $150 billion are deployed to acquire it.
Now, consider that this is worst case scenario and valid only until the end of this halving (the amount of mined Bitcoin per day will be reduced by half after it), next one is around the end of April 2024.
What happens with the numbers after the Halving?#
After the halving, with the current amount of financial energy injected into Bitcoin ($26.5 million), the price would potentially double to around $58.8K, and if 1% of the investment companies applying for an ETF is injected, the math take the potential price of Bitcoin to $882K as soon as that 1% is deployed.
Time frame for price appreciation?#
Unknown, but I would assume before the end of 2024, Why? Because the ETFs are being yet again delayed for Blackrock and Fidelity until December 2023 by the SEC (Security Exchange Commission) in USA.
But USA is not the only country where large Investment Companies are applying for ETFs, it is true that the two largest ones are in USA, but there are many more that combined across the world would add up to a massive additional amount of capital injected into Bitcoin.
The first ETF to go public will be in Europe#
Jacobi Asset Management, issuer of an equity structure for digital assets in Europe with the first Bitcoin ETF, with a total portfolio of approx. $4.8 billion. Assuming 1% (worst scenario) of its portfolio will be deployed into Bitcoin, additional $48 million would be injected. The launch of this ETF was "July 2023", I will assume this capital will be injected between August and December 2023.
Professional investors can already let them know of their interest in their web site:
https://jacobiam.com/jacobi-ft-wilshire-bitcoin-etf/
Long term impact?#
We can divide the long term impact into two arenas:
- Asset appreciation
- Attempts to control the asset
Long terms asset appreciation
As explained before, the more capital is deployed into the asset, and the more time passes, the more valuable and scarce it becomes (one halving every 4 years) and therefore, Bitcoin will continue to appreciate over time by "a lot".
Extrapolate the financial institutions portfolio investment to 5% of 15 trillion dollars, then to 10% and so on. Considering that Bitcoin is the best asset in terms of appreciation of the last 10 years, it is plausible that institutional investors will be eager to put more than 1% of their portfolios into Bitcoin, I would assume that 5% for the most conservative and 20% for the most aggressive will be logical.
You do the math, you will get numbers that will explain why so many financial analyst come with such a high numbers in their predictions of the future price of Bitcoin.
Attempts to control the asset in the long term
Recently I read a post from Chris Blec in X, his post was quite interesting, it reads "Pfizer convinced billions of people to inject a mysterious chemical into their body multiple times but you don't think Blackrock can convince normies that their fork is the *real Bitcoin?"*
A provocative post which opens the door for debate, one that I am certain is being discussed for years already close doors among the Bitcoin community.
Potential Attack vectors
- Forking Bitcoin into POS: Blackrock or a union of Investment corporations could influence with their resources some key developers and miners to fork Bitcoin into a PoS (Proof of Stake) chain, basically centralizing and controlling Bitcoin. A fork creates a new chain and the users will decide which chain is Bitcoin, users decide by changing their Node into the new chain or not, one Node, one Vote.
- Forking Bitcoin to reduce the block time to 1 minute: With the excuse to reduce the validation transaction time. This will imply many changes that will lead to mining 9000 per day instead of the 900 as of today, reducing the scarcity by increasing the offer and therefore reducing the price
- Forking Bitcoin to increase the block size: This was attempted before, Jonathan Bier in his book The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules does a decent job explaining the depths of the attack. But in summary leads to centralization of control of the network
Countermeasures
Education: In my opinion, education is key, those investment funds manage money from wealthy investors, if those investors understand the ethos of Bitcoin and why the asset is so scarce and valuable, they will fight back together with the individual investors for those changes not to be pedaled into the chain. At the end, greed is a very strong motivator and Satoshi understood that perfectly and therefore it is accounted for in the design.
Awareness: A considerable percentage of the Bitcoin investors are well informed and therefore, fear can't be use as a trigger, as it was the case of the pharmaceuticals and their experimental drugs, the investment companies could use their resources to create campaigns pushing their narrative, but the community will see through that and counter it in the social networks quite fast, in my opinion, in the age of information, the legacy MSM (Main Stream Media) can't easily steer the Bitcoin ecosystem opinion as they could have done with the population up to the 90s, now is a real challenge for them. Proof of that is that they have been fighting Bitcoin with everything they got until now. They short it, talk trash it as much as they could in the legacy MSM, call it rat poison, stated that it will go to zero (while secretly buying it...) and after all that, now they are lining up to buy it and speaking highly of the asset.
Run your own Node: Bitcoin has endured 14 years of attacks and survived thanks to the community and investors, we need to stay vigilant and protect it, run at least one Node at home, remember, one Node, one Vote.
Can you think of additional countermeasures?
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/226279
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