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Ok, I realise that the original protagonists are long gone and that the discussion has moved to ETFs but just in case someone stumbles in here and is interested in the original discussion, here's my two sats.
The monetary network that we have been using the last 50 years was originally designed as a layer two scaling solution for gold which had divisibility and portability issues. Governments centralised the gold and issued paper in its place.
This worked for a while until they worked out that they could sell the gold because nobody could prove whether they held the reserves or not. The end result was the abandonment of the gold standard and now the asset backing our cash is Government debt.
When your Government can no longer find someone to buy their debt, your cash evaporates. That is a system based on trust. It's already been violated it just hasn't imploded yet.
Gold had to be centralised to be money in a modern world because it had to be tokenised to allow quick settlement and verification of individual holdings was not possible. For explanation, if I buy something from overseas and want to settle with a paper promise on my gold holdings, there is no way for the other party to verify that my note is good. A centralised, layer two cash system solved the problem because my counterparty only needs to trust my Government.
Bitcoin does not need to be centralised because it is verifiable. It does not need to be centralised because it settles quicker than fiat with no need for permission and no intermediary.
I have no idea whether the derivatives market can get hold of bitcoin and reduce its effectiveness. That's a question for someone smarter than me.
What I do know is that the Government can't just issue more when they want some money to spend. That makes it a pretty good place to put value that you don't want to melt.
