Daily Times

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have been such a smashing success in the US that they now hold more than 1 million of the tokens, or about 5% of what currently exists. That’s in the same ballpark as the amounts that have long been frozen in the wallet of the market’s original whale: The cryptocurrency’s anonymous and enigmatic creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Another buyer of equal size potentially may arrive on the scene, as a Senate ally of Donald Trump’s pushes to pass a bill that would require the Federal Reserve to sell some of its gold in order to fund the purchase of 1 million Bitcoin for a US government stockpile. In the corporate world, Michael Saylor’s software company MicroStrategy is sitting on about $38 billion worth of the tokens and has been tapping capital markets to buy more.

All of these developments were unthinkable in Bitcoin’s early days not so long ago, when each token traded for pennies and the only people interested in it were young Libertarian techies seeking to create a subversive financial system immune to the influence of the government, Wall Street intermediaries and other big corporations. Oh, how times have changed. Now these same establishment institutions are taking over larger and larger swathes of the available Bitcoin.

And the potential creation of a US national stockpile of the cryptocurrency could trigger more governments to buy up Bitcoin, said Mark Connors, founder and chief investment strategist at Risk Dimensions. It all adds up to what’s known as concentration risk. “Will this be a risk of being concentrated by existing G-10, G-20 countries or institutions like BlackRock?” Connors said. “This is a concern, especially for the purists.” Yet you won’t hear much complaining, even among the purists. One reason is simply that the overwhelming demand keeps sending the price higher and higher – at least for now – and hope is rampant that it continues to do so.