The New York Times Still Doesn’t Get Bitcoin

Jeff Sommer, a weekly finance columnist for the New York Times, doesn’t seem to like bitcoin ETFs. Joke’s on him, though, because everyone else seems to.

Up-to-date info isn’t available, but it’s now known that investors have poured at least $1.9 billion into the new crypto-tracking exchange-traded funds in their first three days of trading. The most bullish estimates expect up to $100 billion flowing into bitcoin funds by the end of the year.

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That’s a lot of pent-up demand, beating the last record inflows of $1.2 billion within three days in 2021 … which also went into a bitcoin-based product, ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (which tracked bitcoin futures rather than its spot price), Reuters reported.

See also: Bitcoin Instantly Topped Silver in ETF Market and Trails Only Gold Among Commodities

A number of marquee financial firms including BlackRock, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton lined up to launch bitcoin ETFs, and are now also considering ether [ETH] funds. And yet, Sommer seems ready to write all of this off.

“FOMO is the main reason for putting money into Bitcoin, which remains highly speculative, difficult to categorize and without an immediately identifiable economic function,” the NYT columnist wrote in his latest edition of the “Strategies” newsletter, referencing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) anti-FOMO bulletin.

FOMO, aka the fear of missing out, is certainly a part of crypto investing. For instance, it’s the main driver behind degens chasing the highs of meme coins like BONK or dogwifhat, which truly serve little economic function beyond speculation.

But to write off bitcoin simply as a turn of the roulette wheel with $800 billion on the table is to willingly mislead oneself. You don’t have to personally believe what bitcoiners believe to take their arguments seriously, for fear of mockery or ostracization (FOMOO) by your crypto-skeptic peers, Jeff.

To be fair, Sommer did tip his hat to the technology behind Bitcoin, i.e. b l o c k c h a i n, to hedge his own argument. To wit:

“Bitcoin is a serious proposition, in terms of its underlying structure. The use of…