You mean, Jesus saves… and gambled all His savings on bitcoin?

They are rumored to have 200'000 BTC.  The SEC filing says that the initial offer will be 1 million shares each representing 0.2 BTC.

Why do you think they (or anyone) would want to create a bitcoin ETF?

It depends, do they have artillery shells?

Except that the first 200'000 BTC or so will be purchased from the Winkles' personal holdings.  Some of the buyers of those first 1 M shares will be people who could have bought bitcoins at the exchanges instead.  So at first the launch of the ETF may have a negative impact on price.  Only after that 1 M shares is sold will the fund start buying elsewhere, possibly taking bitcoins off open market.

Even then, it is possible that bitcoin holders who are worried about hacking risks will dump their BTC to buy ETF shares.  For that reason, it is possible that the ETF shares will be priced above their nominal BTC value (i.e. BTC in the fund's vaults will be seen as more valuable than BTC in ones's computers).  In that case the ETF may remove some money (the premium) from the open market

EDIT: Meanwhile, people who invested in BTC through SecondMarket's BIT fund are not allowed to get out and not allowed to sell their shares to other suckers investors.

Well, I saw a gambling site in Australia that lets you bet on whether the bitcoin price will go up or down in some future interval.  They call that a "binary bitcoin derivative" or something like that.  

A complicated analysis, too long to read, but does not seem to give due relevance to one main factor:

Unlike its Latin American neighbors,  Venezuela has little domestic production of anything but oil.  Almost everyhing, inclding food, is imported with revenue from oil exports. The socialistoid regime of Chavez and Maduro redistributed that revenue, but did not change this fact.  With oil  prices down 50% or more, no fiscal or monetary policy will avoid the crunch in their standard of living.

As happened in Greece, Italy, and Spain, the "austerity measures" that bankers (and banker magazines) want to see applied would mean diverting a larger portion of the people's wealth and revenue to bankers, to ensure that they would contunue to profit while the rest of the country gets even worse.

If sea turtles swim with their shell on, why should you do that?

Lawsky actually tried to help.  He spent some of his time drafting a license that would give some breaks to bitcoin businesses in NY.  Most other states basically told bitcoiners (tacitly) to comply with the exisiting rules or get lost.

But Lawsky clearly lost interest in the end.  Perhaps because he could not find a decent way around existing laws and policies.  Or perhaps because bitcoiners, instead of thanking him, kept insulting him for not declaring bitcoin the only allowed legal tender in NY, now!

That is a good analysis, except that "early adopter" should be "divestor", the guy who sells or spends to reduce his BTC holdings; and the last group should be "The investor" instead of "The trader".

The investor is whoever buys BTC today in exchange of old money, goods, or services, in order to start or increase his BTC holdings.

The traders are like consumers, they play on both sides of the board: as investors whenever they buy, and as divestors when they sell.  Different traders may act more in one role than in the other, depending on how their BTC holdings evolve.

There is one fifth group, The miners.  In principle we can assume that they sell 3600 BTC every day at the current market price.  Some miners may also play as investors, by retaining some of their coins, or as divestors, by selling saved coins.  These two roles can be treated as if they were distinct persons and can be lumped with the non-mining investors and divestors, rspectively.

So, in order to keep the price stable, one should have I = M + D, where I is the amount of new money that the investors take out of their pocket to put into the system in exchange of BTC, M is the amount of money that the miners pocket, and D is the amount of money that the divestors (your "early adopters") pocket.  All these quantities should be expressed in USD/day.  Goods or services that are directly exchanged for bitcoins should be counted as their market prices in USD.

Today M is known, it is a bit less than 1 M USD/day.  There is no way of estimating D, but we may guess 1 M USD/day too.  So the investors (recall, people who increase their BTC holdings) must give 2 million USD/day to the miners and the divestors.

The miner's profit is some fraction of M, perhaps still 50%, that is 500'000 USD/day; the other 500'000 day go to mostly to equipment makers and electrical utilites.  The profit of the divestors is even harder to estimate than D itself.  Of course, only the early adopters among them are making a profit, while divestors who bought since November 2013 are only cutting their losses.  

Yes. If there was no speculation (that is, no one holding coins for the expectation of price increases, at any time scale) then the price would be P = V * T / N, where V is the volume of e-payments using bitcoin (in USD per day), T is the mean time between re-use of the same coins (in days), and N is the total number of BTC in circulation. 

At present BiTPay is believed to process about 1 million USD/day; so V = 10 M $/day seems to be an optimistic guess for all e-payments with bitcoin.  The time T is harder to estimate, but it should be less than 30 days (remember, the assumption is that no one holds BTC for longer than necessary).   The number N is about 13.6 million.  So, if it weren't for speculative holding, P should be less than 23 USD/BTC today.

Curiously Kraken too is based in San Francisco.  And Jesse Powell, now Kraken's CEO, flew to Tokyo in 2011 to help fix MtGOX's sowtware & databases after the 2011 hack.   

Could it be that San Francisco is the Harvard of bitcoin exchange medicine? 

Compare the two price charts BTC/CNY and LTC/CNY (best at BTer, 3-day step, logscale). The trend over the past year is very similar: a nearly exponential decay (straight line in logscale), with similar decay rates (slopes).  However, BTC had two extra bubbles -- late May 2014, and November 2014 -- that shifted its trendline upwards, by ~1800 and ~700 CNY, respectively, without appreciable change to the slope. (Bubbles of demand combine in a non-linear and non-multiplicative way, so their effect is a bit distorted in logscale).  

Litecoin is already back to the October 2013 level, meaning that the Mainland China bubble has completely deflated for it.

Bitcoin should be there too, at ~700 CNY, if it had continued following the trend from February 2014 (or from the November 2013 peak) to mid-May 2014.  The current price (~1700 CNY) apparently still includes what is left of those two mini-bubbles; as if the Mainland Chinese bubble had deflated completely underneath them.

The prices of both LTC and BTC by October 2013 still included the "tail" of the March 2013 bubble.  I believe that it was generated in China too, specifially in Shanghai by BTC-China after Bobby Lee became their CEO.  There doesn't seem a way to knwo whether that bubble is holding, or deflating too.

So, if there is no new major development (like the COIN ETF), and the March 2013 bubble holds, LTC may have hit bottom now, while BTC may still see some drops, depending on how those two mini-bubbles evolve.  If there is no new develpment, and the March 2013 bubble too is deflating, there may be further drops for both, but extrapolation becomes too uncertain to tell where the prices will end.

It is only an illusion. There are fewer and fewer bitcoiners posting here, so the same two or three non-believers now seem legion.

Bitcoinwisdom and other chart sites let you set audio alarms when price exits a certain range.  Set it to 350$ and have a good night's sleep.

One that does not allow forks?

Proof of Crawl -- do we have a winning idea there?

Iron know, do you?

Overstock found a good excuse to unload those bitcoins that they were holding. Their bitcoiner fans will cheer while their Q1 financial report will not say "idiots" in red. [/troll]

Will freedom still be waiting for them when they finally get there?

Don't they fear to end up in many pieces?