<story><title>Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC</title><url>https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-spot-bitcoin-etf-approvals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can&amp;#x27;t change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude higher than for getting rid of stock certificates.&lt;p&gt;People underestimate, I think, how much nudging happens at the institutional level which cryptocurrencies might shut down. It is a really exciting experiment from that perspective.</text></item><item><author>pavlov</author><text>My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain.&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividends, there was a coupon that you could cut off with scissors and use to claim the income.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you show up today at a Charles Schwab office with a 1977 Apple Computer stock certificate, and ask to sell it. That piece of paper is theoretically worth more than a Bitcoin (thanks to stock splits). But the Schwab branch surely won’t buy it, they’ll send you away. Getting your piece of paper recognized as stock that you can actually trade in modern systems is a separate process.&lt;p&gt;That’s how it will be with Bitcoin in 2050. You contact Coinbase’s customer service AI and tell them you have an actual Bitcoin on the chain and you’d like to sell it. They’ll politely redirect you to the compliance department that will inform you that it may take up to six months to verify the provenance of your quaint original Bitcoin that’s not registered in the modern custodial systems - assuming your coin has no history with mixers and other addresses of interest to law enforcement, of course.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tsimionescu</author><text>Aren&amp;#x27;t the vast majority of market participants already operating outside the blockchain, relying on exchanges and sometimes on so-called &amp;quot;L2&amp;quot; networks like Lightning? I think the majority of Bitcoin and Ethereum proponents are already talking about them as &amp;quot;digital gold&amp;quot; instead of digital currency. The mining pools have also blocked any attempt to make the Bitcoin blockchain more efficient at transactions (by keeping the block size small), so on-chain trading is doomed to remain an extremely low-rate event for the foreseeable future. Is it still at 7-10 transactions&amp;#x2F;second globally?&lt;p&gt;So overall it seems quite easy to force the matter and implement KYC and AML for msot legal Bitcoin transactions.</text></comment>
<story><title>Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC</title><url>https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-spot-bitcoin-etf-approvals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>The possibility of change exists, but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can&amp;#x27;t change the rules mid-game like what happened with stocks. That is one of the most attractive things about this asset class - if the US regulators want to change how a crypto is traded ... tough biscuits. They have to convince the market participants, globally, to trade the new way. The bar might be orders of magnitude higher than for getting rid of stock certificates.&lt;p&gt;People underestimate, I think, how much nudging happens at the institutional level which cryptocurrencies might shut down. It is a really exciting experiment from that perspective.</text></item><item><author>pavlov</author><text>My prediction is that Bitcoin will become fully institutionalized within twenty years, to the point that the “Bitcoin” held by investors are entirely disconnected from the theoretical blockchain.&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happened with stocks. Not so long ago they used to be physical pieces of paper. You could trade shares peer-to-peer and even anonymously by handing over the share certificate to someone in person. For dividends, there was a coupon that you could cut off with scissors and use to claim the income.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you show up today at a Charles Schwab office with a 1977 Apple Computer stock certificate, and ask to sell it. That piece of paper is theoretically worth more than a Bitcoin (thanks to stock splits). But the Schwab branch surely won’t buy it, they’ll send you away. Getting your piece of paper recognized as stock that you can actually trade in modern systems is a separate process.&lt;p&gt;That’s how it will be with Bitcoin in 2050. You contact Coinbase’s customer service AI and tell them you have an actual Bitcoin on the chain and you’d like to sell it. They’ll politely redirect you to the compliance department that will inform you that it may take up to six months to verify the provenance of your quaint original Bitcoin that’s not registered in the modern custodial systems - assuming your coin has no history with mixers and other addresses of interest to law enforcement, of course.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petesergeant</author><text>&amp;gt; but one of the hardest promises Bitcoin makes is that you can&amp;#x27;t change the rules mid-game&lt;p&gt;Am I misremembering or did the other blockchain do exactly that in response to the DAO hack?</text></comment>