Matt Levine, Columnist

You Still Can’t Buy the Bitcoin ETF

Also Aramco, Papa John’s, darts and sockless loafers.

July 27, 2018 at 3:12 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Bitcoin ETF fail.

Right now if you want to buy Bitcoins, you mostly have to buy Bitcoins. Presumably a lot of people who want to buy Bitcoins want to buy Bitcoins, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people, that is, want to buy Bitcoins, but they don’t want to set up their own Bitcoin wallet or remember their private key or give their credit card number to some shady foreign crypto exchange or deal with the various other headaches inherent in the actual ownership of Bitcoins. Some of those people can buy Bitcoins without buying Bitcoins by buying Bitcoin futures, which trade on big regulated U.S. exchanges. But Bitcoin futures are expensive—a contract is five Bitcoins at CME Group, one at Cboe, and a Bitcoin is currently trading at almost $8,000—and some people don’t want to be bothered with futures contracts. They just want to buy Bitcoins in their brokerage accounts, their retirement accounts; they want to buy Bitcoins like they’d buy a stock.