SEC Approves 11 Spot Bitcoin ETFs (coindesk.com) 58
On Thursday, six spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds are expected to start trading on stock exchanges from Cboe Global Markets, according to a notice posted on CBOE's website. However, the listings still need to be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. CoinDesk reports: The Ark 21 (ARKB), Fidelity (FBTC), Franklin Templeton (EZBC), Invesco (BTCO), VanEck (HODL) and WisdomTree (BTCW) bitcoin ETFs appeared on the exchange operator's "New Listings" page on Wednesday. The listing doesn't mean that the ETFs will be approved by SEC. The commission still needs to approve the applicants' 19b-4 and S1 filings.
"We are still awaiting SEC approval of our spot bitcoin ETFs," a Cboe spokesperson said. "The notices posted to our website are standard procedure in preparation of an ETF launch." The notice comes a day after the SEC's X account was "compromised," posting an unauthorized tweet regarding bitcoin ETFs.
UPDATE: The SEC has approved the listing and trading of 11 spot bitcoin exchange-trading product (ETP) shares, including those of Grayscale, Bitwise and Hashdex. SEC Chair Gary Gensler writes: Today, the Commission approved the listing and trading of a number of spot bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP) shares. I have often said that the Commission acts within the law and how the courts interpret the law. Beginning under Chair Jay Clayton in 2018 and through March 2023, the Commission disapproved more than 20 exchange rule filings for spot bitcoin ETPs. One of those filings, made by Grayscale, contemplated the conversion of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETP.
We are now faced with a new set of filings similar to those we have disapproved in the past. Circumstances, however, have changed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the Commission failed to adequately explain its reasoning in disapproving the listing and trading of Grayscale's proposed ETP (the Grayscale Order).[1] The court therefore vacated the Grayscale Order and remanded the matter to the Commission. Based on these circumstances and those discussed more fully in the approval order, I feel the most sustainable path forward is to approve the listing and trading of these spot bitcoin ETP shares. [...] "While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin," concludes Gensler. "Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto." The full statement can be read here.
"We are still awaiting SEC approval of our spot bitcoin ETFs," a Cboe spokesperson said. "The notices posted to our website are standard procedure in preparation of an ETF launch." The notice comes a day after the SEC's X account was "compromised," posting an unauthorized tweet regarding bitcoin ETFs.
UPDATE: The SEC has approved the listing and trading of 11 spot bitcoin exchange-trading product (ETP) shares, including those of Grayscale, Bitwise and Hashdex. SEC Chair Gary Gensler writes: Today, the Commission approved the listing and trading of a number of spot bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP) shares. I have often said that the Commission acts within the law and how the courts interpret the law. Beginning under Chair Jay Clayton in 2018 and through March 2023, the Commission disapproved more than 20 exchange rule filings for spot bitcoin ETPs. One of those filings, made by Grayscale, contemplated the conversion of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETP.
We are now faced with a new set of filings similar to those we have disapproved in the past. Circumstances, however, have changed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the Commission failed to adequately explain its reasoning in disapproving the listing and trading of Grayscale's proposed ETP (the Grayscale Order).[1] The court therefore vacated the Grayscale Order and remanded the matter to the Commission. Based on these circumstances and those discussed more fully in the approval order, I feel the most sustainable path forward is to approve the listing and trading of these spot bitcoin ETP shares. [...] "While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin," concludes Gensler. "Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto." The full statement can be read here.
bitcoin is still dead (Score:3)
Bitcoin was created in 2008 and it's 2024 and still to date hasn't found a useful purpose
Compare to AI where we're actively integrating it into our daily processes to make them more efficient
Blockchain is dead dead dead. The only people still trading it are those trying to unload it at a minimal loss, or those day trading the volatility.
It's trading for $46k (Score:4)
This is mixing crypto B.S. into our main line financial system. It's terrifying. These are exactly the same kind of financial instruments that caused the 2008 market crash and here we are doing it with pretend money backed by money laundering and ponzi schemes.
It's insane and it's going to cause a horrible, horrible economic crash. I just hope my kid's out of grad school before it hits.
Fuck regulatory capture and fuck the SEC for allowing this. We will all suffer for it except for a handful of too big to fail banks holding us hostage.
Re:It's trading for $46k (Score:4, Insightful)
It's trading at $46k due to wash trading and market manipulation, including the rampant printing of unbacked stablecoins.
The whole crypto ecosystem is a hive of scum and villainy, and the SEC is guilty of dereliction of duty for approving this dogshit.
Agreed (Score:2)
Rando money launders don't get to do that. Letting Wall Street in on BTC *sucks*.
Re: (Score:3)
It's trading at $46k due to wash trading and market manipulation, including the rampant printing of unbacked stablecoins.
Are you really trying to make us believe, that a billion dollar business going on for over a decade comes about by "wash trading" and "scammy stable coins"? Is this really the best research into the matter you can come up with?
You may hate crypto for whatever reason (the bro culture, recklessness and carelessness of main players, "wen lambo" culture, the whole youtuber community of crypto peddlers, unmitigated scams running rampant, ....), but please at least come up with solid arguments against crypto curr
Re:bitcoin is still dead (Score:4, Funny)
Java was created in 1995 and it's 2024 and still to date hasn't found a useful purpose.
Compare to JavaScript where we're actively integrating it into our daily processes to make them more efficient
Object orientation is dead dead dead. The only people still using it are those yadda yadda religious war stuff here...
--
Christ, you tech warriors are tiresome.
Re: (Score:1)
Java was created in 1995 and it's 2024 and still to date hasn't found a useful purpose.
Wow, what kind of moron would write this as a comparison to bitcoin, and with ignorant moderators modding it up.
It is doubly ironic that Java is heavily used in banking, finance and insurance sectors, it is basically the successor to COBOL. It is hard to find a language that is more opposite to bitcoin than Java, except maybe COBOL itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin was created in 2008 and it's 2024 and still to date hasn't found a useful purpose
At the very least, Bitcoin is valuable because it has value. It's worth 45k USD at the moment, and that allows me to transfer value to anybody else in the world with a Bitcoin wallet, without an intermediary. Independent of banks, SWIFT, all the bloated infrastructure, or some bureaucrat who thinks I shouldn't be able to move my own money around. Nothing can stop me from transferring BTC from my wallet to your wallet, only using the Internet. It is safe, secure, uncensorable, and before you say it's for cri
Re: (Score:2)
One major terrorist attack in the US funded by bitcoin and it's all over, they can stop you any time they please. Sure, there are some big fish with billions on the line, but only billions.
If exchanges get cut off from US banking it instantly goes to near zero.
Re: (Score:2)
That is what some lawmakers certainly would like to do. But combating crime and terrorism would only be the pretext for the real goal of protecting the incumbent financial industry from democratized, decentralized rivals. Blockchain and Bitcoin are just tools.
How many terrorists have used the Internet to plan attacks? How many use Smartphones? Mobile networks? How much crime and terror is financed with USD cash bills, which unlike blockchain is intransparent and untraceable?
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin is a competitor to gold, even most remittances still use old banking with all its hurdles because the thirdy exchanges are as likely to scam them as not, nevermind the amount of tech and infosec knowledge you need not to loose your money in the first place.
Transaction costs are a mirage too, once mining rewards drop off to insignificance and lightning network gets too large to be subsidized as a PR project they will go to the stratosphere for both (with LN having terrible user experience to boot). I
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, got to stop you there: "It is safe, secure..."
Um... NO. It is neither of those things, and we probably have not seen the tip of the iceberg with it. Possibilities for bait and switch, fraud, hijacking of wallets, revenge, etc. are limitless.
"Nothing can stop me from transferring BTC from my wallet to your wallet, only using the Internet." That statement is not quite correct. Nothing is stopping you from transferring BTC from your wallet * to another address *.
There is *nothing* that assures tha
Re: (Score:2)
With great power comes great responsibility. You are responsible for your own finances and actions, yes. There's noone to bail you out if you mess up, so you better know wtf you are doing.
On the other hand, there's also no banks to bail out with taxpayer money, once they have evaporated billions due to greed, corruption, deregulation and sheer incompetence. Which happens with some regularity. There is no "too big to fail" in a decentralized, self regulating network.
Re: (Score:1)
Bitcoin is excellent wherever no stable currency market exists. It's only in the US and Europe that Bitcoin is stigmatized by the government and the media. Go to Africa or South America and you'll see plenty of users.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Apple doesn't even sell the iPod anymore, so ultimately Slashdot's prediction proved correct. It's been said before, but Bernie Madoff successfully ran a Ponzi scheme for 17 years. [investopedia.com] Slashdot's predictions of crypto doom may yet come true, just as the iPod did eventually meet its demise.
There are no risks (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark my words, you will pay for this. We all will. This is the absolute worst kind of Wall Street gambling.
The grand master plan of crypto (Score:1)
The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what they want to make you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.
After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.
But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and
Re: (Score:2)
And if it doesn't happen, will you be the first to post here saying you're sorry for misleading investors?
Re: There are no risks (Score:2)
Why would anyone apologize for in good faith warning you about a bad investment?
Are you the kind of person that needs to hear an I am sorry for telling you not to buy that car because it has a sketchy history of maintenance problems, glad you were lucky with yours?
God, that is exactly how a crypto bro thinks isn't it.
Re: (Score:2)
He's projecting a major economic collapse due to some ETF approvals.
Re: (Score:2)
And if it doesn't happen, will you be the first to post here saying you're sorry for misleading investors?
Oh, some folks certainly will make money off of this scheme one way or another. The odds are very low it will be average folks who are just trying to build a nest egg, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Okay great but that happens all the time with numerous different investments. Meanwhile rsilvergun is projecting economic collapse. He's probably wrong.
Re: There are no risks (Score:2)
If pensions funds wanted to invest in crypto for some ungodly reason, why would this be the enabler?
There are already plenty of sketchy ETFs out there, like all of the high dividend stuff.
It will hurt uneducated retail investors, not your retirement. The same people baited into crypto "investing" already, and at least it's happening now not a few years ago at peak crypto hype. But yes, all sketchy ETFs should be cleaned up :/
They don't (Score:2)
The sketchy efts out there aren't traded directly on stock exchanges they're just Ponzi rug pull schemes. That's severely limits The reach they have and their ability to access very large
Re: (Score:2)
Public pension funds are often forced to invest in dodgy and failing investments due to corruption.
Exactly - its called DEI
Re: (Score:1)
Only slightly riskier (Score:2)
Now wait a minute.
11 spot bitcoin is only a little riskier than an 11 spot keno card . . .
Thar She Blows (Score:3)
I can't tell if the BTC hate on /. is real or not. Some of us in the sub 5-digit club remember learning of bitcoin right here, on this site, a long time ago. Some of us probably read these comments and smile. I know I do.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
There's a breed here who learned some stuff in the 90's and everything newer is total crap.
I hang out with some real unix oldsters sometimes (like Bell Labs old) and they are always chasing new hotness.
The BoFH greybeard persona is really just cover for low-iq tech-school certificate types who coasted for a few decades and never improved.
They get angry at blockchains, systemd, and phones because it's too painful to be angry at themselves.
I wish they would know we don't think it's too late for them to start
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, there was a very brief period when people were just playing around with Bitcoin and you could mine it using a CPU. It wasn't long before that turned into a requirement of having a rather high-end gaming GPU, then an entire rig full of multiple GPUs, and finally dedicated mining hardware.
If you wanted to buy it, early on that required knowing people who were willing to sell you some. Later on it meant dealing with super sketchy exchanges (remember Mt. Gox?), and by the time Coinbase became a thing, w
There's a mix (Score:2)
Can you imagine the scale of the crash if instead of real, physical homes the bubble was built on pretend money?
I mean yeah, yeah, money is fake and all that. But not really, since it's backed by the taxing power of your gov't and their laws & military.
BTC's value comes from mone
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you. I really do not understand the hate on Slashdot for a new financial - money really - programming language. Bitcoin is sorta like C whereas Ethereum is more like C++. It's possible to implement a useful financial enterprise using Ethereum -- with complete transparency.
But ... it seems like the majority of people on Slashdot (and a few others) are intent on sticking with opaque financial models. And that's okay too. But the hate is deep on here.
In truth, US Dollars is the currency of choice
Our government is (Score:3)
1. Boost crypto investments because it’s now a “legit, mainstream investment” if you look at it just right, squint hard enough, ignore every rational fiber in your brain, and drink the cryptobro coolaid.
2. Crush Apple cause it’s a “monopoly” if you look at it just right, squint hard, and ignore every rational fiber in your brain, and listen to a bunch of people who hate variety and want every tech company to be a clone of google.
Meh. Whatever. We’re headed towards idiocracy for soooo many reasons.
BTC is worse than selling stocks door-to-door (Score:2)
ETF Fund Manager Wallets (Score:3)
Astounding (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
How something that has no use is worth this much is astounding.
It's useful to criminals. If ransomware scum, drug dealers, terrorists, money launderers, et al, weren't using it, it probably would go crashing straight down to hell where it belongs.
Re: (Score:1)
It's also very popular in the poor countries and as an exchange between countries, especially where communism, sanctions, trade wars and other taxes have made the local currency devalued. Venezuela, Brazil, most of Africa, big sections of Asia, people are rejecting the US dollar due to its own stability and debt issues.
Bitcoin cannot issue debts, therefore it will always be a deflationary currency, which is what you want if you want to lift people out of poverty.
Blowing up a new bubble to cover the previous (Score:2)
Now that the housing bubble cannot be sustained anymore, the SEC moves to pump up the next Bitcoin bubble. We can look forward to another round of collapse and bailout, the difficult part is to determine when.
First Slashdot Article on Bitcoin (Score:4, Informative)
https://slashdot.org/story/11/... [slashdot.org]
Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity517
Posted by timothy on 01:59 PM February 10th, 2011 from the computationally-intensive dept.
IamTheRealMike writes
"The BitCoin peer to peer currency briefly reached exchange parity with the US dollar today after a spike in demand for the coins pushed prices slightly above 1 USD:1 BTC. BitCoin was launched in early 2009, so in only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy real goods and services like web hosting, gadgets, organic beauty products and even alpaca socks."
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the first /. Bitcoin article. I first learned of Bitcoin in Summer 2010 from this Slashdot article [slashdot.org]. I joined the forum, started writing helper scripts, and ended up learning fun things like Verilog during my journey.
But on the main topic, Bitcoin was released as a response to the 2008 financial fuckup, it's even mentioned within the first block of the blockchain. It was created to fight the man of debt-based money and all those financial games. How in the hell did it end up partnering with the m
Please learn how bitcoin works first. (Score:1)
When will the SEC actually do anything? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They had no choice but to accept Bitcoin ETF applications.
They have been delaying it for 10 years and the justice system gave them a severe slap and a deadline to approve them. (That was yesterday Jan 10th 2024)
Its an new asset class, and enough people give it value that is the 10th most valued asset in the world at the moment.
The SEC has no right to prevent its trading, which is what the courts have determined.
Sweet (Score:1)
Now I can short Bitcoin more easily.
Ooh, this gives me an idea ... (Score:1)
Seriously, though, I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency. Other than the currency arbitrage game, how does one "invest" in a currency?