[jegutman]

This won't be the dumbest ETF, it will be a less than ideal way of holding bitcoin. There are lots of ETFs that make it easy to get access to an asset class and get the full economics (foreign exchange ETFs), these are still probably not ideal, but they're reasonable, but bitcoin is pretty easy to buy and sell not sure what benefit an exchange traded product has.

The Wikelvoss's do have a BTC exchange, is the goal to somehow tie this in? Turn their exchange to a market that gets benchmarked? They did also launch the BitIndex. Seems like trying to control the bitcoin benchmark could have financial value.

[darawk]

Maybe it would allow mutual funds and other such entities to invest in it?

They might have rules preventing them from investing in things that aren't traded on major exchanges.

[jegutman]

I'd be kind of surprised if mutual funds were doing much investing in this kind of ETF. Look at the shares outstanding of FXE, FXA, FXB (currency etfs for euro, australian dollar and pound), they're not very popular. Some hedge funds do use these and famously Paulson was using GLD for his gold exposure (I still think this is pretty dumb, he should've traded futures and EFP-ed into spot gold). Wouldn't be shocked to be proven wrong, but most ETFs don't gain traction. There's also a pretty small cap on how big this ETF can get (at least for now), almost by definition the commodity backing a bitcoin etf has a much much smaller availability than the commodity backing any other etf. I am glad they're using cold storage to store them at least.