Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, February 4th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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All right, friends. Well, today we are reading a piece about the Bitcoin ETF, not necessarily

new territory, but one that has a very important message. The piece is by Pascal Gauthier,

the CEO and chairman at Ledger, and is called a Bitcoin ETF will never be your

Bitcoin. Let's read the piece and then we will talk about it. Pascal writes, in recent weeks,

newly approved U.S. Bitcoin ETFs have had stunningly popular launches, judged by trading volume and

flow metrics. However, these ETFs have nothing to do with the true utility of Bitcoin,

which is to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions and circumvent traditional intermediaries.

Bitcoin ETF investors merely get exposure to the price of Bitcoin. They never own the asset.

ETF participants don't benefit from what Bitcoin stands for in the first place, which is to

allow anyone to experience financial ownership and sovereignty. This is precisely what

Bitcoin's anonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto aimed for when writing the Bitcoin white paper 15 years

ago. The main problem with Bitcoin ETFs is that they merely replicate the functioning of our

outdated financial system

built on old technologies. By relying on intermediaries, Bitcoin ETFs, reintroduce counterparty

risks that have underpinned finance for decades. Take Lehman Brothers and more recently

...