I think these futures will do a few things for bitcoin.
- allow an explosion of ETF's, including levered ones, to begin trading. With futures you can now hedge out your bets so it should, at least in theory, be easier to find a counter party to write you a swap against bitcoin volatility. It also lays the ground work for the SEC to see a functioning market for these products which they ahve said is a prerequisite to allow bitcoin ETF's to trade.
- give some rules around what's considered a fork and what should be ignored in the bitcoin world. Each of these products will provide some "adult" guidance to other markets as to which alt coins, forks, etc should be considered vs ignored.
From an implementation perspective there are two differences I see between the COBE and CME implementations.
1) The CBOE’s contract size will be based on a single bitcoin, while the CME’s contract size will be based on five bitcoins, a current notional value of more than $50,000.
2) The CBOE’s contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp. while CME will clear its own futures. The CME has estimated that initial margin on the contracts — or the amount of collateral set aside relative to the value of a trade — may be as high as 30 percent, an unusually high amount.
They also permit borrowing. If I borrow U.S. dollars from you and then disappear, a court can drain the funds (if they’re there) from my accounts. That wasn’t possible with cash. The capability enabled an explosion in credit and financial creativity.
Bitcoin, natively, is like cash. Borrowing and rates are afterthoughts. Futures fix that.
There is a certain hilarity in the multiple layers of hypocrisy here. A bankless Bitcoin coöpted by the banks. Investors wanting Bitcoin washed of its principles. Wall Street establishing itself as a gatekeeper to cheers from its detractors. Nevertheless, a lot of money is to be made.
30% is far too small of an initial margin for such a volatile commodity.
The initial margin is expected to cover a the movement of an observable through making the margin call, the period of time the margin call could be filled, declaring the counter-party in default and closing out the position. This normally adds up to a minimum of 2 working days.
Saying that it's beyond the realms of possibility for bitcoin to jump or fall 30% in 2 days seems ridiculous.
I'm a fan of Bitcoin but here's the truth (source: me, I ran a public company): The real boon here is for new cryptocurrencies as opposed to Bitcoin as it will experience naked shorting resulting in artificial 'sell pressure' from large institutions and hedge funds due to these futures contracts.
In other words, you can take out a large short position without needing any fulfillment while at the same time it factors as 'shares short' against Bitcoin. 'Shares short' is a major component used by institutions to calculate or re-price to the downside and when these numbers are inflated that can result in inaccurate pricing for the benefit of the manipulator.
It's a high-level form of manipulation. This will also reduce Bitcoins volatility and opportunity for large gains in short periods of time.
Of course the reverse is true if institutions want to battle it out on the short and long side but meanwhile the banking divisions of investment banks (JPMorgan et al) remain scared to death of Bitcoin. Ultimately, Bitcoin will have to have more institutional allies and supporters than the worlds banks (banks hate Bitcoin, it makes them irrelevant in the near future) which is quite possible.
New cryptos with low floats (low circulating supply) won't be affected as much thereby offering larger gains in shorter periods of time which will attract more of the typical cryptocurrency day traders and traditional traders.
That's not how futures work. For every long futures contract there is also a short one, the net position is always zero. There are also no shares involved.
I feel like I must have a misconception about bitcoin. Coins are earned by calculating hashes for transactions. As the amount of coins grow the difficulty of calculating hashes increases. This limits the creation of new coins, which increases the scarcity of coins and thus their value. This keeps the incentive to mine at a more or less steady level, thus sustaining the network.
But.. Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable? If I had something in my pocket that I knew would become more valuable by systemic necessity, I’d save it as long as I possibly could. Doesn’t this completely undercut the idea of bitcoin as currency?
> As the amount of coins grow the difficulty of calculating hashes increases.
This is wrong. As the amount of coins grow, the amount of coins generated per block decreases (it halves every
~4 years). The difficulty is completely unrelated to the amount of coins in existence and is instead derived from the hashrate: as hashrate increases, difficulty increases, to target a block rate of 1 per 10 minutes.
> Doesn’t this completely undercut the idea of bitcoin as currency?
I don't think so. Right now people can buy bitcoin which is "guaranteed to become more valuable", and yet they still choose to buy things other than bitcoin with their USD.
Why would it be different if their base currency was BTC instead of USD?
Even if you don't think bitcoin is "guaranteed to become more valuable", there are plenty of things that are close approximations to that (pick any good investment), and yet people still choose to buy things other than investments. How do you explain that? Whatever reasoning you use to explain that can be applied verbatim to explain why people will buy things with BTC instead of just holding it.
> If I had something in my pocket that I knew would become more valuable by systemic necessity, I’d save it as long as I possibly could.
I also save my USD “as long as I possibly can,” by which I mean “until I value something more than the USD it costs to acquire.” In practice, that very frequently ends up being relatively small purchases of things I literally need to survive and function in society, like food, rent, and clothing, but beyond that I try to save as much USD as I can despite it being nearly guaranteed to decrease in value over time.
«If I had something that I knew would become more valuable...»
Because neither you nor anyone is certain Bitcoin will become more valuable. If you knew, you would put all your life savings into Bitcoin this very minute.
That's the reason I personally have been spending bitcoins for 7 years, and will continue spending them. For all I know BTC might crash tomorrow and never recover.
> Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable? If I had something in my pocket that I knew would become more valuable by systemic necessity, I’d save it as long as I possibly could.
Why buy a computer/phone/car that is guaranteed to become cheaper next year, or obsolete within 2. If I were given the opportunity to purchase something that systematically becomes LESS expensive, I'd hold off on the purchase as long as I possibly could.
>Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable?
Yes, and this is a concern for many. Bitcoin might not be the winner for reasons like this, but it is a leader and currently is the winner. There are a lot of people now thinking about these problems and even in some cases, how to add things like inflation to Bitcoin so that people do start spending it more than hoarding it
So people are aware of it, it is just too early in a lot of ways to tell what is going to happen.
Personally, it wouldn't surprise me if Bitcoin is like Mosasic and eventually we are using Firefox, Chrome, etc equivalents of cryptocurrency years from now.
Yes this is one of the problems that bitcoin has to overcome if it ever wants to be something more than an investment currency. You are not the first who notices this problem, see e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
The difficulty increases or decreases proportional to the effort expended, so that new coins are minted every 10 minutes. The 21 million coin limit is hardcoded. To your question about spending deflationary money, one theory is that people may buy more high quality, necessary goods than cheap crap.
That's not quite how it works. The difficulty of calculating hashes is dynamic -- a function of the global hashing power -- to ensure that, on average, each block takes 10 minutes to mine. The miners are rewarded for mining a block from the mining fees paid in each transaction (which can be zero, but it's then very unlikely that your transaction will be picked up) and a reward. This reward started at 50 BTC per block and halves approximately every four years (it's currently 12.5 BTC per block): this is where new bitcoins are created. This series of halvings eventually converges to a sum of 21 million BTC available.
That's one of the problems with deflationary currencies - people are less willing to spend them since they are essentially an investment, making them more volatile. Governments target 1-2% inflation for valid reasons.
>Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable?
Nothing is guaranteed to become more valuable! In the US we’ve had a depression and even a recent recession to help teach us this. Guess it didn’t take.
Yes, which is why it hasn't had any significant usage as a currency. People are just calling it 'digital gold', now.
It's also not correct that bitcoins are scarce. They're only scarce as long as there's a social agreement that 'bitcoins' are the one true cryptocurrency. It's trivial to create new cryptocurrencies or even fork the main bitcoin blockchain. That could turn on a dime and wipe out all of bitcoins value, if some new cryptocurrency comes along and everyone switches to it.
A common misconception is that while Bitcoin may be deflationary in that the rate of supply creation is decreasing, it does not in any way guarantee the value of the coin. Inflation and deflation of currencies are also demand based. If demand for bitcoin falls faster than the decreased rate in which coins are issued, the value must go down.
As with most financial assets with high liquidity, there is no such thing as "guaranteed to become more valuable". If it were, it would already be at that price.
What you are talking about is the speculative value. There is also a utility value for a pseudonymous currency that is difficult to block and nearly impossible to reverse for things like drug sales or laundering money. One big risk with bitcoin is that another cryptocurrency could come along that has lower fees(because of block size or different proof of work system), faster block times for more reliable transactions, more anonymity in practice, or a more useful secondary network.
> Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable
At some point the expected increase in value will be on par with the utility value derived from making the transaction with the bitcoin you already have.
It won't. Bitcoin is a fad. It will run out of fools and when it does there wont be a way out.
Let me illustrate it on a very simple scale. There are four participants in a market. Each one starts with 100 coins and $100 USD. Each coin is valued at a dollar. Minimum units are 1 coin and 1 dollar. What is the maximum market value?
The correct answer comes from a single pre-final stage:
One person has 400 coins another person has 400 USD and the other two people have nothing. At this point the person with 400 USD pays $400 USD for 1 coin giving all 400 coins value of $400 each i.e. $160,000, except there are no $160,000 in this market.
- Unlike LedgerX, the futures will settle in cash, NOT in Bitcoin. So they won't directly create demand for more Bitcoin.
- In effect this is a "bookie pool" for institutions to place side-bets on bitcoin. Although there might be some consumer participation - I reached out to several CME brokers and at least two of them, NinjaTrader (US) and RBC (Canada), intend to provide the futures product to their retail investors (pending internal review).
- Biggest customers will probably be institutions who want to short (bet against) Bitcoin, and those who want to establish a long position (bet in favor of it) but are prevented from buying bitcoin directly (due to regulations, security / handling concerns, etc). You would think the CME trade throttling rules in particular would make buying the asset directly a more attractive option for those who want to go long and have access to other marketplaces (i.e. existing exchanges). For that reason, after the initial "rush" to get in, I think there's a risk the CBOE and CME markets will tend to attract more "shorters" than "longers".
- Naked shorts (placing short orders for assets you don't have and don't intend to buy) are an interesting aspect which I don't fully understand. I think the practice is illegal in US securities, although one of the exchanges from which the CME price index will be derived (Kraken) apparently already allows naked shorts (surprised that didn't catch the eye of regulators).
- A lot of the money in Bitcoin today is retail. Are those folks ideological, or easily spooked? (Probably a mix). What happens if folks start seeing red futures around the corner? Is there a risk the futures indices (with their more-disciplined institutional money) will start leading (rather than following) the Bitcoin price?
While I'm excited by this development (obviously a lot of great PR) I'm concerned there might be risk of it backfiring compared to the overly optimistic expectations I've been reading from existing Bitcoin holders. I really do hope it paves the way to ETF's (where you actually buy a basket of Bitcoin) - something I'd be a lot more excited for. In the meantime, here's hoping my cautious skepticism is unwarranted.
Will be interesting to see how closely these track BTC, both initially and in times of stress.
BTC is difficult to short so if/when there is a sharp decline in price you have to rely on people buying futures instead of BTC outright. I suspect this isn't going to happen so on price declines the futures will fall further than BTC, also leading to bigger crashes in BTC.
Maybe that is a good strategy, wait for some weakness and sell the out of it to see how far it crashes.
Could you say more about why you think the futures would crash further? My understanding is that these are cash settled, so this isn't like a normal commodities market where you actually have to deliver the underlying.
I wonder how long before bitcoin gets banned by us gov completely (or at least conversion to/from usd by us banks).
It seems like this thing is ripe to create either some systemic financial crisis or help governments of countries that are not exactly allied with us interests (china, dprk etc).
Imagine the margin call you're going to get whenever the market swings wildly against your direction...
I assume that most interested parties will use these for hedging purposes, but there's bound to be a few poor souls out there waiting to use these for speculation.
One thing this does is create preferential tax treatment for short term bitcoin trades. These are section 1256 contracts, so instant 60/40 tax split, vs 100% real income tax.
You'll see some institutions move away from the BTC/USD market for this reason.
I am wondering if anyone has been in contact with a brokerage that is going to list the Cboe futures when then 'go live' on Sunday. I haven't spoken with one that hasn't said 'we'll wait and see'.
Bitcoin is a currency right? Where is the Forex level leverages being offered? We need to speculate on bitcoin with 100:1 or 200:1 to really get this bubble expanding.
it has recently come to my attention that Darknet vendors now prefer Monero over Bitcoin - it's more anonymous, and transactions are (currently) faster.
I don't know if that means anything long-term, but Darknet was the first place that had a lot of Bitcoin adoption.
It's currently very difficult to buy Monero with cash, typically you buy Bitcoin and exchange it for Monero on a secondary exchange.
With every passing year, more and more financial products and services are being created around Bitcoin: futures, ETFs, swaps, and so on.
These products built on each other: the ability to hedge with futures will enable the creation of additional Bitcoin products and services, entangled with each other in complicated financial networks.
Regardless of what you think about it, Bitcoin is slowly but surely becoming a PERMANENT component of the world's financial infrastructure.
It's not difficult to imagine a future in which having some kind of Bitcoin exposure in a portfolio becomes conventional wisdom.
I had trouble understanding bitcoin myself, and therefore stayed away from it, but what made me understand it, if shinny metals and compressed carbons pieces have huge markets, eg. gold has a cap of 7 trillions and bitcoin is just 150 billions, and just work why bitcoin would not also work, even when you buy gold jewellery or diamonds, in the back of your mind is the resell value, (hedge against inflation), not that they look much better than a fake, or the coated version.
Maybe in US inflation isn't a problem but in my country until a few years 7% inflation was low, although maybe the official inflation is low, but as far as I know asset prices have gone up due to quantitative easing.
[+] [-] chollida1|8 years ago|reply
- allow an explosion of ETF's, including levered ones, to begin trading. With futures you can now hedge out your bets so it should, at least in theory, be easier to find a counter party to write you a swap against bitcoin volatility. It also lays the ground work for the SEC to see a functioning market for these products which they ahve said is a prerequisite to allow bitcoin ETF's to trade.
- give some rules around what's considered a fork and what should be ignored in the bitcoin world. Each of these products will provide some "adult" guidance to other markets as to which alt coins, forks, etc should be considered vs ignored.
From an implementation perspective there are two differences I see between the COBE and CME implementations.
1) The CBOE’s contract size will be based on a single bitcoin, while the CME’s contract size will be based on five bitcoins, a current notional value of more than $50,000.
2) The CBOE’s contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp. while CME will clear its own futures. The CME has estimated that initial margin on the contracts — or the amount of collateral set aside relative to the value of a trade — may be as high as 30 percent, an unusually high amount.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
They also permit borrowing. If I borrow U.S. dollars from you and then disappear, a court can drain the funds (if they’re there) from my accounts. That wasn’t possible with cash. The capability enabled an explosion in credit and financial creativity.
Bitcoin, natively, is like cash. Borrowing and rates are afterthoughts. Futures fix that.
There is a certain hilarity in the multiple layers of hypocrisy here. A bankless Bitcoin coöpted by the banks. Investors wanting Bitcoin washed of its principles. Wall Street establishing itself as a gatekeeper to cheers from its detractors. Nevertheless, a lot of money is to be made.
[+] [-] destructaball|8 years ago|reply
The initial margin is expected to cover a the movement of an observable through making the margin call, the period of time the margin call could be filled, declaring the counter-party in default and closing out the position. This normally adds up to a minimum of 2 working days.
Saying that it's beyond the realms of possibility for bitcoin to jump or fall 30% in 2 days seems ridiculous.
[+] [-] KasianFranks|8 years ago|reply
In other words, you can take out a large short position without needing any fulfillment while at the same time it factors as 'shares short' against Bitcoin. 'Shares short' is a major component used by institutions to calculate or re-price to the downside and when these numbers are inflated that can result in inaccurate pricing for the benefit of the manipulator.
There are plenty of examples of this and one of the most high profile cases is related to OSTK (Overstock): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne#Campaign_agai...
It's a high-level form of manipulation. This will also reduce Bitcoins volatility and opportunity for large gains in short periods of time.
Of course the reverse is true if institutions want to battle it out on the short and long side but meanwhile the banking divisions of investment banks (JPMorgan et al) remain scared to death of Bitcoin. Ultimately, Bitcoin will have to have more institutional allies and supporters than the worlds banks (banks hate Bitcoin, it makes them irrelevant in the near future) which is quite possible.
New cryptos with low floats (low circulating supply) won't be affected as much thereby offering larger gains in shorter periods of time which will attract more of the typical cryptocurrency day traders and traditional traders.
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844765
[+] [-] bobcostas55|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stfwn|8 years ago|reply
But.. Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable? If I had something in my pocket that I knew would become more valuable by systemic necessity, I’d save it as long as I possibly could. Doesn’t this completely undercut the idea of bitcoin as currency?
[+] [-] jstanley|8 years ago|reply
This is wrong. As the amount of coins grow, the amount of coins generated per block decreases (it halves every ~4 years). The difficulty is completely unrelated to the amount of coins in existence and is instead derived from the hashrate: as hashrate increases, difficulty increases, to target a block rate of 1 per 10 minutes.
> Doesn’t this completely undercut the idea of bitcoin as currency?
I don't think so. Right now people can buy bitcoin which is "guaranteed to become more valuable", and yet they still choose to buy things other than bitcoin with their USD.
Why would it be different if their base currency was BTC instead of USD?
Even if you don't think bitcoin is "guaranteed to become more valuable", there are plenty of things that are close approximations to that (pick any good investment), and yet people still choose to buy things other than investments. How do you explain that? Whatever reasoning you use to explain that can be applied verbatim to explain why people will buy things with BTC instead of just holding it.
[+] [-] baddox|8 years ago|reply
I also save my USD “as long as I possibly can,” by which I mean “until I value something more than the USD it costs to acquire.” In practice, that very frequently ends up being relatively small purchases of things I literally need to survive and function in society, like food, rent, and clothing, but beyond that I try to save as much USD as I can despite it being nearly guaranteed to decrease in value over time.
[+] [-] mrb|8 years ago|reply
Because neither you nor anyone is certain Bitcoin will become more valuable. If you knew, you would put all your life savings into Bitcoin this very minute.
That's the reason I personally have been spending bitcoins for 7 years, and will continue spending them. For all I know BTC might crash tomorrow and never recover.
[+] [-] dnautics|8 years ago|reply
Why buy a computer/phone/car that is guaranteed to become cheaper next year, or obsolete within 2. If I were given the opportunity to purchase something that systematically becomes LESS expensive, I'd hold off on the purchase as long as I possibly could.
[+] [-] 27182818284|8 years ago|reply
Yes, and this is a concern for many. Bitcoin might not be the winner for reasons like this, but it is a leader and currently is the winner. There are a lot of people now thinking about these problems and even in some cases, how to add things like inflation to Bitcoin so that people do start spending it more than hoarding it
So people are aware of it, it is just too early in a lot of ways to tell what is going to happen.
Personally, it wouldn't surprise me if Bitcoin is like Mosasic and eventually we are using Firefox, Chrome, etc equivalents of cryptocurrency years from now.
[+] [-] dominotw|8 years ago|reply
Its not guaranteed though. Bitcoin may go out of favor and coins can become worthless, doesn't matter how limited the supply is.
[+] [-] misja111|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciimo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xophmeister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhostVII|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|8 years ago|reply
Nothing is guaranteed to become more valuable! In the US we’ve had a depression and even a recent recession to help teach us this. Guess it didn’t take.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
It's also not correct that bitcoins are scarce. They're only scarce as long as there's a social agreement that 'bitcoins' are the one true cryptocurrency. It's trivial to create new cryptocurrencies or even fork the main bitcoin blockchain. That could turn on a dime and wipe out all of bitcoins value, if some new cryptocurrency comes along and everyone switches to it.
[+] [-] jjxw|8 years ago|reply
As with most financial assets with high liquidity, there is no such thing as "guaranteed to become more valuable". If it were, it would already be at that price.
[+] [-] gnopgnip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
Fred Wilson, a prominent VC investor and Bitcoin proponent, said as much in August: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
[+] [-] 88|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pault|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|8 years ago|reply
At some point the expected increase in value will be on par with the utility value derived from making the transaction with the bitcoin you already have.
[+] [-] chairmanwow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourday|8 years ago|reply
Let me illustrate it on a very simple scale. There are four participants in a market. Each one starts with 100 coins and $100 USD. Each coin is valued at a dollar. Minimum units are 1 coin and 1 dollar. What is the maximum market value?
The correct answer comes from a single pre-final stage:
One person has 400 coins another person has 400 USD and the other two people have nothing. At this point the person with 400 USD pays $400 USD for 1 coin giving all 400 coins value of $400 each i.e. $160,000, except there are no $160,000 in this market.
[+] [-] kgwgk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lug0r|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rkagerer|8 years ago|reply
- Unlike LedgerX, the futures will settle in cash, NOT in Bitcoin. So they won't directly create demand for more Bitcoin.
- In effect this is a "bookie pool" for institutions to place side-bets on bitcoin. Although there might be some consumer participation - I reached out to several CME brokers and at least two of them, NinjaTrader (US) and RBC (Canada), intend to provide the futures product to their retail investors (pending internal review).
- Biggest customers will probably be institutions who want to short (bet against) Bitcoin, and those who want to establish a long position (bet in favor of it) but are prevented from buying bitcoin directly (due to regulations, security / handling concerns, etc). You would think the CME trade throttling rules in particular would make buying the asset directly a more attractive option for those who want to go long and have access to other marketplaces (i.e. existing exchanges). For that reason, after the initial "rush" to get in, I think there's a risk the CBOE and CME markets will tend to attract more "shorters" than "longers".
- Naked shorts (placing short orders for assets you don't have and don't intend to buy) are an interesting aspect which I don't fully understand. I think the practice is illegal in US securities, although one of the exchanges from which the CME price index will be derived (Kraken) apparently already allows naked shorts (surprised that didn't catch the eye of regulators).
- A lot of the money in Bitcoin today is retail. Are those folks ideological, or easily spooked? (Probably a mix). What happens if folks start seeing red futures around the corner? Is there a risk the futures indices (with their more-disciplined institutional money) will start leading (rather than following) the Bitcoin price?
While I'm excited by this development (obviously a lot of great PR) I'm concerned there might be risk of it backfiring compared to the overly optimistic expectations I've been reading from existing Bitcoin holders. I really do hope it paves the way to ETF's (where you actually buy a basket of Bitcoin) - something I'd be a lot more excited for. In the meantime, here's hoping my cautious skepticism is unwarranted.
There's some good discussion over at Quora: https://www.quora.com/How-will-futures-trading-on-CME-affect...
[+] [-] rb808|8 years ago|reply
BTC is difficult to short so if/when there is a sharp decline in price you have to rely on people buying futures instead of BTC outright. I suspect this isn't going to happen so on price declines the futures will fall further than BTC, also leading to bigger crashes in BTC.
Maybe that is a good strategy, wait for some weakness and sell the out of it to see how far it crashes.
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thibautx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banderman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xutopia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheeshkebab|8 years ago|reply
It seems like this thing is ripe to create either some systemic financial crisis or help governments of countries that are not exactly allied with us interests (china, dprk etc).
[+] [-] ckastner|8 years ago|reply
I assume that most interested parties will use these for hedging purposes, but there's bound to be a few poor souls out there waiting to use these for speculation.
[+] [-] ShabbosGoy|8 years ago|reply
Could be a great opportunity to arbitrage based off of price desync across exchanges.
[+] [-] scurvy|8 years ago|reply
You'll see some institutions move away from the BTC/USD market for this reason.
[+] [-] jeff7289perrin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swarnie_|8 years ago|reply
Failing that, ill settle for a x3 ETF
[+] [-] jes5199|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
These products built on each other: the ability to hedge with futures will enable the creation of additional Bitcoin products and services, entangled with each other in complicated financial networks.
Regardless of what you think about it, Bitcoin is slowly but surely becoming a PERMANENT component of the world's financial infrastructure.
It's not difficult to imagine a future in which having some kind of Bitcoin exposure in a portfolio becomes conventional wisdom.
[+] [-] kpga|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicfoxs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blibble|8 years ago|reply
my prediction: huge amounts of bogus trades every day to manipulate it
[+] [-] down|8 years ago|reply
Maybe in US inflation isn't a problem but in my country until a few years 7% inflation was low, although maybe the official inflation is low, but as far as I know asset prices have gone up due to quantitative easing.
[+] [-] NOSHSHNACKERS|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] isolli|8 years ago|reply
One thing we know is that you can't trust market participants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal