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Comment by ArtTimeInvestor | Hacker News Reader

Why would someone buy Grayscale then and not just hold Bitcoin in their Paypal account for example?

This fund is probably not for retail investors, i guess pension funds or similar institutions invest in it.

Pension funds are willing to give a away 2% annually to someone else for holding an asset for them?

Typically funds will also do a lot of work in selecting the asset, but in this case the hard work is in giving them exposure to an asset they couldn’t otherwise have invested in.

Why would they not have been able to buy Bitcoin themselves?

I would guess it's a too risky investment for them.

There's actually a pretty low-risk 40% gain by doing some paperwork and having access to some big player only loans.

See my other comment for a link which describes the play in more detail.

Starting, not to mention promoting, a large fund takes a lot of work, trust me.

I’m not sure what 40% you are talking about though.

Not to say that Grayscale is really making the world a better place by providing an actually useful service.

Bitcoin is still very esoteric, buying bitcoins is nothing like investing in the stock market. A large (or small for that matter) financial institution probably wouldn't want to buy 10 or 100 m worth of bitcoins from Bitmex.

There may be issues in their legal structure the prohibit direct investment or their Board feels more comfortable offloading the technology risk to someone else. Alternatively, they may want certain liquidity features (or other options) that may not be directly available.

Yes, and its a scam. The american people are paying for the fund managers to get rich

https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2020/11/24/why-this-refle...

Is this the spread to NAV you mention?

https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_na...

It seems the spread is down to 4% now.

And it seems people were willing to pay up to 40% on top of Bitcoins value for GBTC. That is crazy ...

That probably doesn’t directly benefit Grayscale that much though, depending on their fee structure.

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