I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?
Gold isn’t easy to steal because there are centuries worth of physical security demands that have evolved to protect it. Its relatively easy to take a chunk of metal from someone otherwise.
Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.
Gold isn't easy to steal because it's heavy, and the more you steal, the more it weighs. There's a big difference between stealing an ounce of gold and stealing five tons of gold. But there's no difference in "weight" between stealing 0.1 BTC and 10,000 BTC.
Also, securing physical assets is much easier than securing digital assets.
If you have stored your seed securely (in a safe, preferably engraved on stainless steel), then no problem, you can re-generate your private key on a new wallet from it.
If you haven't written down your seed before generating your private key and also lost your private key, your money is lost. Thank you for this sacrifice for the common good, but you will want to educate yourself better next time.
Yes, if only one of a 2 of 3 account was lost. A person having a single seed phrase on a single cold wallet would lose coins and would probably benefit from using a service to educate them.
You can laser engrave a Bitcoin wallet seed (24 words) on titanium, store it in multiple locations and never enter your seed on a networked computer to prevent remote theft. You can also use a passphrase on top of your seed, and store it separately, so that even if the seed is physically stolen, the wallet won't be recoverable without the passphrase.
Your coins aren't stored on a computer but on a distributed ledger around the globe, secured with strong crypto, Merkle trees and proofs of work. Your (hopefully cold) wallet only stores your private key.
Gold is hard to transport, easy to confiscate and hard to divide, thus difficult to use as a currency. None of those apply to Bitcoin. Well, unless someone is dumb enough to leave his money on an exchange.
Well, BTC isn't some asset that doesn't have a track record of growth. Take a look at the rate of growth in last decade. Yes if you look in specific timeframes it will look like a wreck. but looking at a bigger picture it makes sense. And it is given that it will keep growing similarly in the long term (Why?, thats a separate lengthy conversation the answer to which also answers why some of largest finance players are rushing to put out an ETF of BTC)
Coming to the security and safety part. In theory, BTC was made with a intension to be easily usable and accessible. Once you understand it, its pretty simple and straightforward (even easier than using a bank's service). No level of hardware wallet failure will compromise the funds because the funds are not in the wallet rather the record of the funds are in 100s of thousands of BTC nodes that is being run by miners and other enthusiasts. The real threat may be letting people that share OTPs to scammer handle their private key and seed phrase. Thats where custodians like coinbase comes in.
And to the point of how to make sure the fund held by ETF/Custodian is actually there or not, This can be easily verified. Tt is a public ledger and anyone with the public key can see how much funds are held in the wallet. This aspect of transparency is one of the key selling point of BTC.
I would recommend a short and interesting read - "Inventing Bitcoin".
That’s the definition of asset appreciation. This is comparable to buying gold 100 years back vs now, no one is complaining Gold is doomed because it was dirt cheap a century ago, not did gold lose its ability to retain value because it was getting expensive. Although the rate of growth won’t be this explosive for BTC in the future as it is now.
Late adopting rich people might still get into BTC ETF for its ability to maintain its value in the long term, as simple as that and doesn’t matter at what price they buy.
Exactly they aren’t. But they have some parallels in properties (fungible, less prone to inflation etc)
But gold or any other precious metals for that matter still has a flaw of having unlimited supply. Yes the supply is limited on earth but we are only couple of decades far from mining asteroids like 16 Psyche.
Flood the market with gold, it will drastically lose its value and this will indeed help its consumption like manufacturing of electronics etc but gold as an asset would be pointless.
This cannot happen in BTC, which is programmed to have finite supply.
Most likely some sort of cold wallet. With some in hot wallets for liquidity. There are many crypto custodians who do this.
Now they do have to design redundancies for the keys. eg. they should not lose access to the assets because say they made it too safe and cant find the keys anymore :p
It's funny because it happened with Prime Trust a crypto custodian. But I'm sure a company like BlackRock can and will do better.
I have no idea, but I assume that if they get hacked they are liable for that. If the ETF is run by Bob's Bitcoin ETF incorporated in the Virgin Islands then that's not worth anything because there are no other assets to cover losses. But if it's BlackRock (or some other large US money manager) then they have plenty of other assets to pay out.
I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?