Do bitcoin ETFs conflict with bitcoin's original ethos?

Some folks are suggesting that a bitcoin ETF is absurd because it doesn't fit with Bitcoin's original ethos. On the contrary, I think it's a nice snug fit.

It would be a misunderstanding of bitcoin's history to assume that it was the idealism of cypherpunk-ism that gave birth to the Bitcoin movement. Bitcoin would never have got off the ground without a massive amount of old fashioned greed. In bitcoin-speak, this greed usually goes by the term number-go-up, and it was crucial from the start. The new bitcoin ETFs are certainly not cypherpunk, but they are very much in the founding spirit of number-go-up.

One of the main goals of the 1990s cypherpunks, if you recall, was to create anonymous digital cash. And while bitcoin certainly has some roots in cypherpunk ideals, the ethos of number-go-up clashes with the dream of digital cash: after all, an asset with a volatile price makes for an awful medium of exchange. Before long, number-go-up had drowned out the cypherpunks.

I recall walking into Montreal's Bitcoin Embassy in 2014, which was located on the busy intersection of St-Laurent and Prince-Arthur. I had already been researching and writing about bitcoin for a few years, but decided to play it dumb to see how the folks at the Embassy would approach the task of teaching a newbie about bitcoin. Instead of preaching to me about how to make a bitcoin payment from my own self-custody wallet, the ambassador walked me over to a large screen showing bitcoin's price. "Look, it's rising," he said in awe.

That, in short, sums up bitcoinism. Like 1980s televangelism with its gold-plated cowboy boots, mansions, private jets, and a dose of God on the side, bitcoin is all about the price chart with a small helping of cypherpunk ideology.

Number-go-up has always required getting ever more people into the game. Bitcoin, after all, is itself sterile. Unlike a publicly-traded business, it doesn't generate a stream of improving profits, so the only way for its price to keep rising is to recruit more players, much like a pyramid or a chain letter. From the early days, getting access to traditional financial and banking infrastructure has been crucial to making this recruitment process go as smoothly as possible.

Docking bitcoin to the existing financial edifice began in 2010 with the first bitcoin exchanges, which hooked into the crucial global bank wire systems like SWIFT, as well as local wire systems like the Federal Reserve's Fedwire system and Europe's SEPA system. These integrations were key to pumping the initial rounds of money into the game, and pushing the number above $1, and then $10, $100, and $1000.

Later on, bridges to the Visa/MasterCard debit card and credit card networks brought an even tighter fusion between bitcoin and the regular world, more inflows, and more number-go-up. The addition of bitcoin purchases to mobile payment apps like PayPal and Cash App came after. Viewed in this context, ETFs are nothing new, really; they only represent the next coupling between the two worlds.

As for regular old finance, it isn't complaining. The task of players like Visa is to generate profits – they want nothing more than to add new products like bitcoin to the list of products they already connect. The curious result is that no chain-letter style product has ever gone as mainstream as bitcoin has.

Now that bitcoin ETFs exist, number-go-up demands even more linkages to traditional finance and banking. What's next? One possibility: expect the bitcoin community to lobby for federally-chartered banks to be allowed to offer bitcoin products alongside savings deposits and retirement accounts. Banks offering bitcoin to their retail client base may seem inconsistent with bitcoin's more cypherpunk-y dreams of replacing the banking system, but on the contrary: its hard to imagine a more fantastic recruitment tool for number-go-up.