May. 10, 2022
To whom it may concern at the SEC, my name is Matthew Long I operate a food truck in Lawrence Ks and I’m an investor in Greyscale Bitcoin Trust. Im writing to express my full support for the conversion of GBTC into an exchange traded fund. Despite the fact that bitcoin is essentially the same price it was when I made my investment I’m down roughly 30% because it now trades at a steep discount to NAV. As you know an ETF would trade at the fair value of the underlying assets, your mandate is investor protection, thusly forcing people into an inferior product with wild swings between premiums and discounts is you failing at your job. Since my investment in GBTC you have approved multiple futures based bitcoin ETFs, again as you well know this exposes investors to contango bleed therefore you once again have forced investors into an inferior product and failed at your job. Your reasoning for previous denials of a spot bitcoin ETF was a supposed lack of transparency and therefore potential manipulation of the bitcoin spot market yet the futures etf‘s you have approved derive their price from these very same bitcoin spot markets. How is that not an utter hypocrisy? I think the real reason for your denial is evident to everyone and will be very evident to the courts if you once again fail to do your job and that is you simply want to hold back your approval of a spot ETF as leverage, a bargaining chip if you will, until you gain sufficient control of the exchanges that sell bitcoin yet in doing so you are holding investors of GBTC and futures bitcoin ETF’s hostage in an inferior product until that day comes. Bitcoin is widely regarded even by you at the SEC as a truly decentralized digital commodity/property, your issue with the exchanges in question is not their connection to bitcoin but rather the markets they provide for many tokens and projects that are clearly unregistered securities so investors in GBTC are essentially being held hostage as a bargaining chip in a fight that doesn’t even pertain to them, how is that protecting investors? An approval of a spot bitcoin ETF is in no way an endorsement by the SEC or America in general of bitcoin as an asset class it’s simply an acknowledgment of the fact that we as a free country value choice, restricting an investors choice and forcing them into inferior investment products flies in the face of the values we’re supposed to stand for. Once again I’ll state that your job at the SEC is investor protection so why am I as an investor wondering who I can find to protect me from you? Thank you, Matthew Long