Choose Freedom by Choosing Self Custody.

Lately there's been lots of chatter in this room lately about buying ETFs and conflating value with dollars rather than (IMO) valuing it through Bitcoin. To me owning bitcoin means that you (and only you) own and control your private keys. Not buying IOUs (ETF shares you can't independently audit) from TRADFI of IOUs from Coinbase that very likely is selling many more sats than they truly custody.

In my view, Bitcoin is all about eliminating counterparty risk and bringing a global hard money standard / store of value that can't be debased by any government or group of people while being a censorship and confiscation resistant system fully independent from the TRADFI system.

The Wall Street / TRADFI teams clearly have a conflict of interest with Bitcoin's rise as it directly challenges the value proposition of the fiat system in which they currently thrive and have become so unfathomably wealthy. That said they are completely incentivized to take extreme dollar losses on these TRADFI products (ETFs, futures etc.) as long as it delays, damages, or destroys the rise of bitcoin. These firms know as well as we do that they're too big to fail and that even if they go bankrupt do to losses in this space that they'll simply be bailed out by the government. With that said IMO TRADFI has 2 main goals by pushing the ETFs and in the following order:

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1. Trying to control the dollar/fiat price of Bitcoin:

They can continue their manipulation of the fiat price by using several tactics.
- Buying OTC and selling spot market (perhaps the real Spot in these Spot ETFs?).
- Using their arsenal of other TRADFI tactics that have historically worked on other commodities such as futures , rehypothecating, commingling etc.
- Colluding with centralized exchanges (CEXs) to have fake volume moving the fiat price in whatever direction they want.

2) Hedging for when Bitcoin ultimately breaks free:

They (TRADFI) know that as people start to truly understand bitcoin that folks will innately chose self custody, roll their own offline addresses, and run a node that they run for their own transactions. They also know people are starting to see that their fiat system is an utter disgrace and a mere echo of a once hard money backed system which ultimately failed due to it's reliance on centralized trust and the betrayal of that trust, of which Bitcoin doesn't need as the saying "Don't trust, verify" beautifully encapsulates. Once folks start this en masse they will lose control of the fiat price. I would imagine that they're going to acquire as many bitcoin as possible until they ultimately lose control of the price in dollars in the hopes of remaining relevant in a post Hyper Bitcoinized world.

In summary, while from many newcomers perspective bitcoin is about making dollars, (it was for me too when I first got into it), it's really not. It's about replacing the value that those dollars control with bitcoin and that will only happen when we self custody them and force TRADFI to change the global unit of account to Bitcoin rather than fiat / centralized currencies. That, IMO, will be when we will truly win.