I already pay a premium[0] on GBTC over the underlying crypto so I can have easy exposure in my IRAs, and would gladly do so for ETH, LTC, BCH etc.

0. Average 52-week premium 56.18% https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GBTC:US

For existing only 3 years in one of the greatest bull markets, it’s a little early to call the value in GBTC.

I imagine fund investors will get instant exposure to any new crypto asset listed to coinbase or gdax. Which might be worth the price of admission alone if you think Coinbase listing an asset has the potential to drive the price up

Nah, the fund starts trading only 5 days after trading becomes available on GDAX. From the methodology paper: "Each reconstitution will occur at 5pm Pacific Time on the fifth day that the new asset is traded on GDAX. This is designed to reduce the effect of any temporary price volatility in the new asset in the first few trading days after its listing."

I would guess rebalancing regularly to track their index would result in more fees than the index fund fee.

Edit: Apparently they only rebalance once a year? In which case, nvm.

To be fair, it's market cap weighted. You could just buy every stock on the S&P too, but lots of investors prefer VOO.

You can't easily go buy a fraction of every stock in the S&P 500 whereas I can easily go buy a fraction of the coins in the Coinbase index. This means it is easy for me to go turn $100 into a market cap weighted index of the 4 coins on Coinbase, but it would be impossible for me to go turn $100 into fractional shares of all the companies in the S&P 500.

Is this seriously all it is? Laughable.

be tempted to do it with buying bcash.