
Winklevoss Twins Bitcoin ETF Rejected by SEC - chollida1
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/26/winklevoss-twins-bitcoin-etf-rejected-by-sec.html
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ur-whale
Worthy of note, this is not as clear-cut as one might think.

Within the SEC, there are dissenting voices:

[https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/peirce-
dissent-34-...](https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/peirce-
dissent-34-83723)

~~~
21
The issue seems to be "prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices"
in the spot markets.

Is stop hunting considered a manipulative practice? Because it's happening
every day in bitcoin markets. But stop hunting also happens in the currency
markets (which also have ETFs), albeit they are more sophisticated and tend to
happen around news. I'm not talking about bucket shops, I'm talking about the
real interbank market.

~~~
ur-whale
How does stop hunting work in currency markets? If you want to go stop
hunting, it seems you need to be able to push the price down somehow, no?

On an unregulated BTC exchange, that's fairly easy to do (e.g. wash trading).

Short of collusion between many high-level actors, how do you do that in the
interbank market?

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21
For those who don't follow, there is another set of ETFs still under active
proposal by an ETF specialist company.

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paul7986
Bitcoin was increasing and possibly because of this ETF news and that Coinbase
was considering adding more crytpos. It went up to $8507 then I saw news SEC
is now taking its time on making a decision. From that day it’s been sliding
back down.

~~~
arisAlexis
exactly the manipulators are USA media an not offshore...

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crypto-jeronimo
For details, please, refer to the list of strong arguments discussed by Emin
Gün Sirer, who is a Cornell University professor and blockchain researcher:
[https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1022695497511841792](https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1022695497511841792)

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antidaily
Has it ever been discussed as to how much BTC the Winklevoss twins own?

~~~
21
> Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss won $65 million from the Facebook lawsuit, and
> invested $11 million of their payout into Bitcoin in 2013, amassing one of
> the largest portfolios of Bitcoin in the world — 1 percent of the entire
> currency’s dollar value equivalent, said the twins at the time. Their slice
> of the Bitcoin pie is now worth over $1 billion after Bitcoin surged past
> $10,000 last week to now trade at $11,100

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/16732952/winklevoss-
twins...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/16732952/winklevoss-twins-
bitcoin-billionaires-surge)

A comment from 2013 on HN saying it's hilarious that savvy investors like the
Winklevosses would put money in such an obvious ponzi:

> This is clearly illuminating the Ponzi-like elements of Bitcoin. As in a
> Ponzi scheme, early arrivals to the system earn easy money, funded by later
> arrivals. Tales of bitcoin fortunes draw more and more entry to the system,
> leading to large payoffs for second stage arrivals, attracting more
> speculators due to the media attention and very real money that has been
> made by early players. This continues until, oh, wait, bitcoins aren't so
> easy to mine anymore and there's no new wave of incoming money to pay of the
> next generation of miners.

> The hilarious thing is that Bitcoin is quite transparent about exactly how
> it works, while a real Ponzi scheme goes to great lengths to hide this
> dynamic. Anyone can see this dynamic in the rising price and the increasing
> CPU time needed to mine a new coin. And yet, brilliant, savvy investors like
> the Winklevosses are somehow still getting involved...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5570422)

~~~
everdev
I'd be so tempted to take my $32.5M and retire for life. Pretty gutsy to
invest 17% of your wealth in a single early stage technology when they did. I
guess retiring on $27M instead wouldn't be so bad either though if it bombs.

~~~
21
Investing 17% when you are worth 65 mil is different than when you are worth
65 k.

If you fail, you'll have just one vacation house in Miami instead of two. I
could live with that.

~~~
tunesmith
How different, I wonder?

First assume that the 65 mil and 65 k are the amounts that each person has
_above_ what they truly need to survive. Like, above a living wage.

Economists often say the value of money is roughly logarithmic as it goes up,
which would mean that both of those two people would lose exactly the same
utility.

But this would imply otherwise. Does 17% of 65 million truly have less utility
than 17% of 65k? (Some people would argue it has more.)

~~~
21
> Economists often say the value of money is roughly logarithmic as it goes
> up, which would mean that both of those two people would lose exactly the
> same utility.

Your conclusion contradicts the first part of your statement.

[https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/utl...](https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/utlity-function-risk-aversion-600x411.jpg)

[https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishing-
marginal-utility-of-income-and-wealth/)

~~~
everdev
Here's a counter argument: It probably depends on your aspirations. If you
want to be a billionaire and you make $65k/year that $11k probably has low
utility because you're so far from your goal and there are social and
government safety nets to help you if you fall into poverty. But at $65M, that
$11M might be one of only 3 or 4 shots you have at investing in a moonshot and
making your $1B.

But, if your goal is to just feed yourself and vacation every once in a while
than I could see how the value of money increases logarithmically.

If you view yourself as a company or an investor though, it might increase in
value as you accumulate more because it puts you in an elite group that can
invest in billion+ dollar ideas that could change the world.

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arisAlexis
there are many things that the CBOE application addresses differently

