Overall, I consider ETFs an excellent financial technology that has helped millions if not billions of investors access a broader range of markets and asset classes, and save possibly trillions of dollars in costs versus older and more traditional fund vehicles.
I also consider myself relatively liberal in my opposition to most forms of censorship, including the "censorship" by a regulator not approving an ETF that would give investors easier access to new and different markets, but just as free speech laws don't protect your right to "shout 'FIRE' in a crowded theater," regulators can do some public good by "censoring" an ETF with external harms beyond the volatility and risk of loss inherent in ETF investing.
I would even consider an ETF backed by a pure bet on a future event (say, the winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, or what the top U.S. corporate tax rate will be in 2020) as more suitable and useful than a Bitcoin ETF, since at least the bet-backed ETF would help centralize a prediction market on a more mainstream platform than sites like IEM, PredictIt, or Betfair.
Last year I wrote this article describing the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust ETF (COIN) as a horse-drawn Ferrari, but in response to Eric Balchunas's "Five Reasons the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF Should Be Approved," I was encouraged to write a rebuttal with the following six reasons the SEC (and other regulators) should again reject any ETF whose sole purpose is buy and hoard a cryptocurrency with hope of price appreciation:
Reason #1: Wrapping Bitcoin in an ETF (or any 21st century cryptocurrency in a 20th century fund structure) cripples the new technology with old overhead
Blockchain technology has the ability to greatly simplify and streamline many financial functions like price discovery, settlement, and fund administration and make it
