Are Bitcoin spot ETFs really an institutional adoption?

I keep hearing people using the ETFs approval as some kind of an unprecedent example of institutional adoption of BTC, but is that really the case.

There is a very important distinction in most peoples statement on this subreddit, that many are wrong about but keep repeating it as truth. The wealthiest fund managers like Blackrock are not adopting Bitcoin, they are simply opening and accommodating an additional channel for those that want to adopt Bitcoin as an investment.

If I was going to compare the approval of ETF to anything more common, I would have to say that its like a big box store, taking a chance on brining in a niche product and hoping they will have a lot of sales. They themselves are not using that product in their store but simply make it more accessible to those that want it. Saying that, there is no way to guarantee that the product will be an instant success and will fly off the shelves, does it? Things get discontinued from big box store all the time.

That is a very big difference and that is also a reason why the existing Bitcoin ETFs in Canada and Europe are not doing anywhere close to the amount of business everyone projects the new channel should bring. Bitcoin has now been around for 15 years. Its not a new thing by any measures. Its not hard to get at all anymore, since setting up an online crypto brokerage account in US or Europe and funding it take minutes now and not weeks like it did when I bought my first Bitcoin in 2017.

I won't even go to the narrative that both banks and governments have been heavily pushing for a decade now that crypto currencies are nothing more then methods of payment for criminals and terrorist. If you think, people will just forget about that and start piling into the most risky investment on the planet, with a history of collapsing in value by 75-85% on a regular basis, you are all out of your mind.

It really reminds me of the Coinbase listing on stock exchange. It was hailed as the moment the financial markets recognized that crypto exchanges are an legitimate businesses and have a place along stock markets and other financial exchanges. The results were no where near the hyped numbers projected to come into the crypto space and ETFs will turn out the be exactly the same. It will help bring in some additional funds, that otherwise would not come in, but it will be far from revolutionary and earth shattering as many are making it to be.

After all Blackrock or any other institution, currently applying for Bitcoin ETFs, has not committed to put any of its existing funds under management into the crypto ETFs but simply offer another channel for those that might want to use it, outside already available means of crypto exchanges. There is a reason why most popular Canadian and European Bitcoin Spot ETFs are just around 2 billion of dollars under management each and not more then that. By the way most of the growth in those ETFs came from recent price increase of Bitcoin itself and not some wide spread adoption of investors.