Cover your ass is not the same thing as malicious intent.
The mandate is to hold bitcoin. They attempt to hold bitcoin. They are not allowed by the mandate to own anything else. In the event of a fork, they will try to pick the winning coin (to stick with the mandate) but there is no guarantee they will be correct in which coin they choose.
If there were an ETF before the fork wars, and it did not have this disclosure, they would be required to hold BTC, BCH, BSV, BSABC etc. Think it was bad? It would have been so much worse with a multi-billion dollar ETF required to hold them all in proportion (and keep buying the losers to keep up with capital inflows) instead of picking a winner and dumping the rest.
So they have to pick a winner. But if they get it wrong, the company would be on the hook for billions of dollars in liability and failure to disclose the risk of getting it wrong. Think I'm joking? There is an active lawsuit against the second most valuable company in the world because they failed to accurately disclose their overexposure to crypto mining (the same business decision that set them up to be the big AI chip winner and potentially become the most valuable company in the world).
Thank you for providing your valuable perspective on this, @josephsavage. You have a much better experience base from which to "weigh in" on this topic than most.
That said, I would appreciate your "straight up" assessment of at least the potential for ... "malicious intent." As stated, one would assume you believe there is ... "Nothing to see here kids. Move along ..." Blackrock is just "doing their job" and it is as simple as that?
Blackrock is a huge firm made of lots of individuals. The guys at the top don't care about Bitcoin, it's just another profitable ETF. The guys running the fund care about not messing it up- which is about key security, and proper protocols for share issuance and redemption.
If they somehow did push for a forkcoin and it destroyed the value of the ETF for Blackrock, they would be unemployable anywhere. (In investment management because they broke ranks and actively changed the composition of what should have been a passive fund, and in crypto space because they architected a destructive forkcoin.) If they somehow pushed for a forkcoin and it created value for Blackrock (somehow? through greening the chain? generating forkcoins that they could sell off profitably?) they would personally capture none of it (because compensation packages for administering a passive ETF do not included bonuses based on the performance of the underlying).
TLDR- no individual at Blackrock would benefit enough from pushing a forkcoin to compensate for the career risk of pushing a forkcoin and having it blow up in their face.
Very good! Thank you for this additional insight! 🫡👋
Good to see you back man! And thanks for your insights.
They could be just covering their ass but only time will tell
Yeah they are covering their ass ofc, I'm just doomposting because its been a while since I posted something funny lol
Yeah imagine forcing Blackrock to hold all previous forks cos they didn't think of this posibility
Man I missed your insights, been a while!