Vanguard and Bitcoin mean what a reasonable person thinks they mean. Brings to market is “This can be purchased through at least one discount brokerage in the U.S. on any day before this times out.” I expect resolution to be utterly unambiguous.
This market mirrors a Twitter-based gentleman’s wager between Patio11 and Mike Dudas but resolution is based on ground truth not that wager.
https://x.com/patio11/status/1745510066281656574?s=46&t=NAASaDpWsx9Lm3_OYE2hCQ
1,000People are also trading
Their position is on bitcoin is wrong, and people tend to become less wrong over time.
Bitcoin is far less speculative than a small cap tech stock. 80% confidence it outperforms gold over the next 30y. Most small tech stocks will go to approximately zero.
In the long term limit with static market share, the price of bitcoins is indexed to NGDP while the price of gold is indexed to NGDP minus supply expansion. Whenever nominal interest rates are less than NGDP growth (as they almost always are) people will be incentivized to hold bitcoins in lieu of dollars. Gresham’s law can operate in reverse in the absence of effective legal tender laws such as in international e-commerce.
more concretely, checking accounts almost universally pay deeply negative real interest rates, and investing the excess cash in short term bonds requires some work, some expenses, and provides near zero risk adjusted real returns in the long run average. Keeping cash in bitcoin provides positive real returns with less work and no counterparty risk. If I ran an ecommerce website I would be happy to accept bitcoin payments into self-custody and just hodl that in the corporate treasury instead of paying some lame payment processing firm 5% to immediately convert it to fiat. And some of my suppliers, especially Chinese factory owners eager to get their money out of China, would be happy to accept that bitcoin.
This question is different from the news about Vanguard not allowing purchases of Bitcoin ETFs: It requires Vanguard to operate their own Bitcoin ETF, which seems very unlikely.