from Hacker News

Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

by knwang on 11/29/17, 4:22 PM with 351 comments

  • by mads on 11/29/17, 8:45 PM

    Man, this is just weird. I just bought 0.05 Bitcoins (you know FOMO and all that) and it just feels so much more empty than back in the days when I mined them myself with my brand new dual Xeon CPU and later on was thinking grand thoughts and building little projects with epaper ink displays to display QR codes on small devices that would work on low bandwidth connections and maybe offline. Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress and scams everywhere and people being all religious about Bitcoin. Every man for themselves and to the moon... These days I am even getting scam calls from something called the Bitcoin Academy with people cheering in the background, when it reaches the all time high. No kidding...

    I have no idea what to do with my 0.05 BTC. Just let them sit there, I guess as a curiosity of old days. I don't really feel that I fit into the moon community and I don't really feel I want to build anything around this tech just because it is not about tech anymore.

    Had lots of Bitcoin sift through my hands. Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? Those were the times.

    Sincerely, One of the first 1000 users of MtGox (proof in the leaked MtGox database :P)

  • by chollida1 on 11/29/17, 7:21 PM

    My guess is that this is probably pretty meaningless.

    There are a few things going against them.

    - The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first

    - since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all

    > One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.

    This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.

    If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.

    This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.

    see: http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/3785/understanding-margin-ch...

    > Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.

    This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.

  • by LeoJiWoo on 11/29/17, 9:11 PM

    https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/935900326007328768

    Well John McAfee thinks bitcoin will hit 1 million by 2020.

  • by bochoh on 11/30/17, 12:43 AM

    So here's a scheme that could be used to wildly profit in the fiat market. If you're what is considered a bitcoin "whale" holding millions worth of the currency you would just setup a short on bitcoin futures. Then you initiate a large sell from a well known whale wallet. This would trigger a large sell as stop losses are triggered. Profit then re-buy the dip.

  • by londons_explore on 11/29/17, 7:57 PM

    Can an expert explain for the less informed:

    * Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity?

    * Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?

  • by slg on 11/29/17, 8:29 PM

    There was a 4 hour stretch this morning in which Bitcoin lost over 20% of its value. In the last 45 minutes it is up 13%. I wonder what a long straddle would cost on this thing.

  • by richardw on 11/30/17, 3:06 AM

    Eek. Add leverage to BTC? Now fortunes can be made and lost on micro movements.

    Prefer buy and ignore for a decade. Still a trade rather than an investment but at least you can only lose what you put in.

    BTC moved 20% down in the last 24 hours. That's like a market crash in old money. Leverage that and life will get exciting, fast.

  • by colemannugent on 11/29/17, 7:18 PM

    >... New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is the only one of the four major U.S. exchange operators without public plans to offer bitcoin derivatives.

    That's pretty big. A couple years ago people were very skeptical that the big players would ever start dabbling in Bitcoin.

  • by alex_duf on 11/30/17, 11:00 AM

    I thought BTC going above 10000 was the end of the bubble, but with announces like that it's just the beginning.

    Each time it grows I fear bigger damages... But I also hope I'm wrong and I'll be just proven to be a fool for not having a bigger amount of bitcoin (I mined some back in the days)

  • by fragsworth on 11/29/17, 7:21 PM

    Hopefully it's not cash settled like the CME. That is the worst idea ever, and will probably cause a lot of people to get screwed over by market manipulation. Especially since the CME is basing the cash settlement price on a single exchange: GDAX. Anyone can go to GDAX and crash or spike the price for one minute at 4:00pm any day and trigger a bunch of margin calls on the CME.

    Especially considering how easy it is to make a bitcoin transaction (compared to things like wheat, or oil...) it really should be "bitcoin settled".

  • by junkscience2017 on 11/29/17, 8:46 PM

    inevitable that this will turn into another taxpayer bailout, somehow

  • by argo_ on 11/30/17, 2:13 PM

    If the bitcoin price was increasing linearly people would not be blaming the technology so much. Rapid exponential growth followed by abrupt decline in repeated cycles makes people confused.

  • by chx on 11/30/17, 10:12 AM

    What is the difference between Bitcoin futures and gambling?

  • by dailyvijeos on 11/29/17, 11:11 PM

    Tulip bulbs anyone?

  • by tonetheman on 11/30/17, 1:14 AM

    Seriously the top comment here should, WUT THE FK!

    Man we should instead of trading bitcoins trade fish in World of Warcraft. Insane times we live in.

  • by chinathrow on 11/29/17, 6:52 PM

    I don't know why you should be able to speculate on a speculation product with no real underlying other than a power conversion function.