If an official decision from the agency that regulates financial assets for the most powerful economy in the world doesn't count, then when does "something about a currency actually change"?

Anything that prevents Bitcoin from:

- being a good anonymous currency

- being a truly global currency for irreversible online transactions

- being a currency that's easily programmable

That's the three main use cases for Bitcoin. There are contenders for #1 (Monero, Dash), and for #3 (Ethereum). For #2 it's still the easiest because of the huge network effect behind it.

Traditional currencies can't compete with crypto for neither of the space. They are attached to systems that prevent transactions from being anonymous, global, irreversible or programmable.

There's nothing that prevents Bitcoin from being a good anonymous currency. It simply isn't.

Its design allows it to be pseudo-anonymous at best, while Monero, for instance, has anonymity built in. Therefore if one seeks a truly anonymous currency they cannot possibly find it in Bitcoin.

While technically nothing changed, the SEC approving an ETF directly tied to bitcoin would have changed how Bitcoin is perceived by a lot of people.

> Nothing about the currency actually changed.

You can say this about about everything: "while nothing about the pound changed, brexit caused the price to go down."

Brexit had real world impact on how the currency would be used in the future and the strength of the economy of the country that stands behind it. The SEC decision does none of that.

The SEC decision very clearly has real world impact on how Bitcoin will be used in the future.

> The SEC decision does none of that.

That's because Bitcoin isn't directly tied to any economy. But just as Brexit had a real world impact on the pound, the SEC decision had a real world impact on bitcoin: It is directly tied to how people perceive Bitcoin, which is an import aspect just as well.