As Bitcoin goes mainstream, Wall Street looks to cash in

NEW YORK — Love cryptocurrencies or hate the very idea of them, they’re becoming more mainstream by the day. “The one thing you can say for certain is that the advent of the era of the Bitcoin ETF opens up the opportunity for Wall Street to make money on Bitcoin in a way that it hadn’t been able to previously,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research at Morningstar. Whether investors win or not is a big, bold question mark.” Bitcoin has come a long way since someone or a group of someones under the name Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a paper in 2008 about how to harness computing power around the world to create a digital currency that can’t be double-spent. The chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said in August that the world of crypto doesn’t have enough investor protection and “it’s more like the Wild West.” That hasn’t been enough to halt the immense momentum for crypto, as it’s gone from an online curiosity to a bigger part of the cultural and corporate landscape. That’s the same JPMorgan Chase run by CEO Jamie Dimon, who said in an interview with Axios this month that bitcoin has “got no intrinsic value.”