May. 11, 2022
Dear SEC, My name is Nathan & I'm a trucker in my 20s from New England. I don't make a lot of money, but I make enough to get by even with todays inflation. I try to invest about 10% of my income for retirement, because I know that w/ federal budget issues, social security might not be there for me in 50 years in a way that I can rely on to retire comfortably. Part of my retirement investments, a small amount, has gone to purchasing BTC. But unfortunately, the lack of a Bitcoin ETF means my options to get direct exposure were either MSTR, whose BTC is bought on loans, Futures "ETFs" which can have gaps & rollover costs & aren't settled in physical bitcoin, or GBTC, which fully owns its BTC & whose shares confer direct ownership of a tiny fraction of a BTC to those who own the shares. In the last year, GBTCs price has diverged significantly from the NAV of its BTC holdings, and my portfolio has fallen in value even as BTC goes up, and goes down. If you let GBTC convert to an ETF, small investors like me won't keep getting hurt, and seeing our assets be hammered, by inaccurate pricing since an ETF is much better at tracking the underlying prices. I understand your concerns about market manipulation and all that, but at the end of the day it's a chicken or egg problem, and having a real ETF will draw in tons of liquidity that will help stabilize BTC & make it harder to manipulate. FYI, a lot of my other friends who work as laborers, homesteaders, gig workers, and in IT also are invested in GBTC, and they're getting hurt by your decision too. Please stop hurting workers who just want to have some BTC, in addition to Stocks, USD, & Gold saved up for retirement in an uncertain future. I know you mean well, but your decisions are literally making the wealth inequality worse!!! Please approve a bitcoin ETF, and if that means letting Grayscale convert its trust, then by all means do so! You guys at the SEC get big salaries, and will retire on a federal pension, and work in academia making money off lecturing, but for me as a trucker, I don't get any of that, not even good health insurance! Not even a pension or overtime after 40! Please have some compassion for the working class you rule over, and stop denying us a shot at what your privilege has already granted you! Sincerely, -- Nathan Zwillich