The wacky Winklevii are at it again!

[randomness]

They just filed an S-1 with the SEC. They propose to create an ETF holding bitcoins, called the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust.

This is nuts, of course. If you wanted to hold bitcoins, you could just buy them yourself. Why would you pay the Winklevii to hold onto some bitcoins for you? "Trust", indeed.

Felix Salmon says:

Still, if you want to own bitcoins, and you never want to spend your bitcoins, and if you want to pay the Winklevii for the privilege of looking after your bitcoins on your behalf, and if you trust that the Winklevii, after putting out a huge shingle saying “millions of dollars worth of bitcoins stored here”, won’t get hacked and lose all their coins, — then, well, then I’m afraid I have bad news for you. Which is that the SEC will never, ever, approve this product.

The FT post linked from the S-1 image above also includes this animated GIF from The Social Network:



If you really want to do this, you could pay me! I'll hold your bitcoins for you. My fees will be lower than the Winklevii, and I'm much nicer than they are.

Comments

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Oh my God you did not just assign them a gens. OMG. That is a riot. It's a plebeian gens, I'm quite certain. (Roman scholars, correct my terminology here, please, I'm not at ALL certain it's right but this is a quick guess.)

I'll leave you be about how Winklevoss isn't a normal singular in Latin, because the joke is funny.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is a special kinda crazy. It basically amounts to, "we want to start a fund to prey on people who think, 'gee, I keep hearing about these Bitcoins and want to invest, but I don't understand them at all.'"

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, Winklevii is directly quoted from Felix Salmon, but I've heard it elsewhere too. I think people have been referring to them like that for some time.

I'm certainly not taking credit for it.

As you say, it's not necessarily grammatically correct, but it is funny.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Well, Winklevoss isn't far off enough from Winklevus, which would be a proper singular. So it works well enough to be LOLworthy! LOL.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

They also funded a site to broker sales of bitcoins. BitInstant.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

we want to start a fund to prey on people who think, 'gee, I keep hearing about these Bitcoins and want to invest, but I don't understand them at all.'

It's called "financial services". It's well-known that a substantial fraction of affluent stock investors will buy stock in companies that they don't even know what they do, just because they've heard a "hot tip" that the stock will rise.

But if you have $100k burning a hole in your pocket, and you want to buy Bitcoins based on a five-munite phone conversation with your broker, what other choice do you have?

As Salmon says:

As I explained back in April, bitcoin is a combination of two things: it’s a very interesting payment mechanism, and it’s also a highly stupid and speculative store of value. With their new product, the Winklevii are basically separating the two, and selling — for an extra fee — the stupid-investment part of bitcoin without any of the benefits of the much more interesting and useful payments-mechanism aspect.

As I read somewhere, most individual investors in the commodities market view it as an alternative to outright gambling.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

That's interesting... ETFs appear to be more liquid than the underlying assets. In a sense that's true, as you're more likely to be able to sell the ETF quickly in times of market stress, but you may get stuck with a hefty discount relative to underlying NAV. But they can easily be pitched as a straightforward way to buy into exotic assets, like Egyptian stock futures.