I think too much is being made about initial investments in the ETFs. This opens up a whole new world to investors who considered the process of dealing with an exchange and having a personal wallet for storage just too complicated. I have a few friends that I have talked about Crypto over the years but did not push it much because I did not want to get into babysitting the management of the purchase and storage. Now I am free to advise them to go for it up to 5% of their long term investments. The money that goes into these EFTs are basically reducing the available overall supply because these are long term investments and hedges against the financial system. Professional financial advisors are now more free to reconsider Crypto as well. What if Fisher Investments started seeding their accounts with 2% or 3% allocation to Crypto. Entire Pension Systems may begin to allocate a small 1% to 2% allocation to this investment as well. Yeah, as always the pre launch sizzle caused too much of a runup but no doubt this will be a real long term boost to Crypto and establishes it as a real investment much to the chagrin to most on ET who still refer to it as the "tulip mania".
I’ve thought a lot about the tulip mania comparison. Some major differences is that tulip bulbs are perishable and they are also capable of increasing their numbers indefinitely. Bitcoin isn’t perishable so there is no risk of it wasting away like a pile of cash in a house fire. There is also a maximum amount of BTC that can exist.
That's already priced in. Markets are always forward-looking. The only thing that isn't... is the aping levels due to animal spirits. This is hard to predict.
The halving may or may not be priced in. It all depends on the cost of mining, which isn’t equal for all miners. The miners using higher priced electricity will likely quit mining while other miners that have an electricity rate advantage could even increase their capacity. If a mining operation has a low rate they will probably keep mining (as long as it’s still profitable) and then add rigs as price increases. I haven’t seen any figures on that though. The ETF story that has me curious is that grayscale is dumping bitcoin just as the ETFs are buying in. It’s working out for the new ETFs to have extra time to gather investor funds without pushing price up. I believe it’s orchestrated this way. The early ETF investors will show great returns, and that will be great advertisement to bring in additional investors. If this truly is a mania it’s in its early stages and not the end.