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Launch of Bitcoin Futures Trading Crashes CBOE Site (thestreet.com)
"5PM CT is the start of Bitcoin futures trading and the $CBOE website appears to be down," one market watcher posted on Twitter (and his observation was quickly confirmed by other cryptocurrency-watching accounts and confirmed by CBOE). "I'm guessing watching Bitcoin futures start trading is a more popular spectator sport than anticipated."
Bitcoin futures will also begin trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in eight days. The Street report that the anticipation of that "has triggered wild swings in bitcoin prices over the last week." Overall, trading bitcoin futures is a positive development for the cryptocurrency says the research team at Fundstrat... The introduction of derivatives lays the necessary market structure for institutions to allocate cash towards cryptocurrencies, points out Fundstrat... Short sellers may now express negative views on bitcoin, which could lead to short-term pricing pressure. But the ability for short sellers to hate on bitcoin could be viewed as a longer term positive, Fundstrat says. Shorting essentially creates true price discovery and means that hedge funds could take bitcoin more seriously. This should improve the long-term prospects of bitcoin as it broadens sponsorship, Fundstrat believes.
Bitcoin futures will also begin trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in eight days. The Street report that the anticipation of that "has triggered wild swings in bitcoin prices over the last week." Overall, trading bitcoin futures is a positive development for the cryptocurrency says the research team at Fundstrat... The introduction of derivatives lays the necessary market structure for institutions to allocate cash towards cryptocurrencies, points out Fundstrat... Short sellers may now express negative views on bitcoin, which could lead to short-term pricing pressure. But the ability for short sellers to hate on bitcoin could be viewed as a longer term positive, Fundstrat says. Shorting essentially creates true price discovery and means that hedge funds could take bitcoin more seriously. This should improve the long-term prospects of bitcoin as it broadens sponsorship, Fundstrat believes.
Bitcoin is like Trump. Unstable.
Not all shorts help with price discovery. Covered shorts do, but naked shorts are just plain fraud, no matter what excuses the clearinghouses come up with.
See that "Preview" button?
Can you short Bitcoin futures?
What an original comment on Slashot ! always predicting 0 future price on bitcoin since 8 years ago.
We just need to talk about Jon Katz writing an article about Bitcoin using emacs on his linux desktop, all while listening to Metallica MP3s on his Microsoft Zune.
I man sure there will some form of separation from the real-time system. There will be some float and bulk execution. Volume just needs to be average maintained not kept in sync with reality to stay in the market. Thou of course covers, floats, and bulks will only smooth out the volume only so much. Upping transaction fees and building back into the equity price would help, but it too has limits.
I need to by some now! Before it becomes a bubble.
Bitcoin is now becoming a thing that matters. Welcome, geeks. We will short the thing that matters. We will speculate on the thing that matters. Websites and co providing crucial infrastructure for the thing that matters will be ill implemented. By morons. It's becoming a thing that matters because people believe that it matters. Not because of reality. Or because of physical presence or existence. Rawly because of believe.
Welcome all.
Welcome to nothing. Welcome to everything.
Tulip mania 2.0. Now in bitcoin. It is fantastic.
My guess is you don't have to record every trade in the block chain. Brokerages themselves could just hold a shit ton of bitcoin in their own account, If it trades hands from one user the the other within their brokerage, there's no reason to report back out to the block chain, just update in their ledger who's holding what. Just as when you trade stocks these days you dont get a stock certificate in the mail.
I am pretty sure this is how a lot of existing bitcoin exchanges have operated. Coinbase does not maintain a separate bitcoin wallet for all of their users, they have the bitcoin pooled in many large wallets and keep track of whom owns what on their ledger. It's not until you move it out of coinbase to your own bitcoin wallet that it gets recorded in the blockchain.
If the brokerages run short, they could purchase more bitcoin, or if they have more in reserve than they feel comfortable holding without someone having claim to it, they sell it back off to the blockchain.
And of course were talking about the financial industry here, you know they'll be cooking the books. Possibly selling off more bitcoin to their users than they actually own. Just like the games played in the financial industry involving cash and loans
That last thing, that's just called shorting the market. If you do it, you gotta expect the broker will too. Just so they can cover, it's all good.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Old saw: Those who know don't talk, those who talk, don't know, or are talking their book. Why should BC be any different - the ripoff artists in the casino haven't changed one bit. Yes, you can make money in tulips, or maybe we've reached a "permanent high plateau", or maybe someone strikes gold. But in the gold rush, the guys who made money either got out quick, or sold supplies to the prospectors. Similar stories for every bubble. You have been warned. The exit ramp is going to be very very crowded...
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
LazyCoin is rooted in reality and practicality.
Brokerages themselves could just hold a shit ton of bitcoin in their own account
LOL! Why do you think they're only trading in futures, not actual bitcoins?
If it trades hands from one user the the other within their brokerage, there's no reason to report back out to the block chain
Correct, but you can't trade arbitrary amounts that way.
No sig today...
https://twitter.com/BitmexRekt...
The fools who shorted are already getting squeezed, and losing their money.
Yes. There are several problems.
The first, and most fundamental is that blockchain technology is inherently non-scalable. It is, effectively an ultra-redundant database system, operating on diverse hardware, in diverse regions, and which has a monotonically growing, non-prunable dataset. It is estimated that there are around 100k nodes in the bitcoin network maintaining a copy of the dataset, and participating in peer-to-peer replication. The total quantity of storage required for each database entry and the network traffic to replicate it are non-negligible.
The proximate problem is an artificial limit on transaction capacity implemented several years ago. At present, the system is designed so that the dataset cannot grow by more than 1 MB every 10 minutes. This limit was put in place to avoid spam attacks resulting in a DDOS of the network. There is a non-trivial computational cost to validate each entry cryptographically. Even my quad core i7 CPU can take 10-15 seconds to validate a 1 MB database update message. Lesser nodes, like ARM devices which wish to maintain a full copy of the dataset may need to dedicate 10-25% of CPU time just to handling incoming updates (i.e. each message incoming at 600 second intervals may require 60-150 seconds of CPU time).
The problem is that demand for transactions exceeds the hard limit. As a result, there is a queue of pending transactions, which currently stands at about 200 MB (or about 30 hours), with transactions removed from the queue in order of the amount they wish to pay as fees. This has led to spiralling fees as users try to outbid each other, in order to have their transactions accepted. Transactions with low fees have recently been timing out after 2 weeks in the queue and have been discarded unprocessed.
There has been an attempt to increase the transaction limit. However, because the bitcoin system is decentralised and based on consensus, such an upgrade would require 100% participation. Anyone that fails to upgrade would find their software completely broken, possibly silently so, such that they could spend bitcoins, but they would not be received, with no warning to this effect. A very complex solution has been developed which permits an increase in the limit with backwards compatibility (as well as fixing some minor security bugs), but as yet the reference node implementation has no GUI or meaningful CLI/API access to it; the network and accounting implementation is fully featured, but there is no practical way to use it, short of developing your own transaction bitstream generator, using some sort of middleware or a 3rd party library with its own low-level API, or a non-reference implementation of the software. As a result, use of this new format has been very limited, and only about 10% of the achievable capacity uplift has been realised.
This has seriously fractured the community. The incumbent developers take the view that the inherent inscalability of the blockchain concept means that development efforts should be focused on layered solutions. Transactions in the main bitcoin blockchain should be large value clearing transactions, which serve to aggregate large numbers of lower value transactions made at a second layer, with potentially microtransactions at a 3rd layer begin aggregated into 2nd layer transactions. Additionally, breaking changes should be avoided unless there is no other credible option, as not all participants run the reference code, and some may have made custom modifications which may require significant development time to implement new mandatory features.
Other groups have taken the view that convenience and capacity available immediately are more important, and have proposed breaking changes. One group, calling themselves bitcoin cash, changed the transaction limit to an 8 MB soft limit, based upon the a configuration option settable in the node options, hence the network can be upgraded to a larger capacity, simply by the majority of participants increasing the soft limit on the
I'm hopeful that Futures moves large speculative transactions off-chain, and Lightning network moves small ones off chain, so that the number of on-chain transactions will significantly decrease, relative to the use of BTC as and investment/currency. Eventually the main chain will just be used for large settlement transactions.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
- John Maynard Keynes
This is a not a joke, you can short Bitcoin on many platform... go ahead!
Anybody who thinks this will make bitcoin go down is nuts. One of the biggest hurdles for the average joe has been getting his money in. Now that they can do it through their broker the price will spike.
And if you think the price will eventually go to zero, you may well be right, but trying to predict when will break you first.
You're not trading coins. You're making a bet on the price at some date in the future.
Just what the market needs, more volatility!
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
If it's good enough for Star-Lord, it's good enough for me!
#DeleteFacebook
US national debt is denominated in US national currency. Therefore it doesn't matter how imaginatively large the numbers become, fedgov can always pay. It's impossible for a sovereign power to "run out of money". Money is just numbers in a database - are we going to run out of inches or tons, too?
The hard part is domestic price stability and maintaining a steady foreign exchange. That stuff can get really wrecked by bad monetary policy. But any actually-sovereign country can ALWAYS pay its own-currency denominated national debt.
What an original comment on Slashot ! always predicting 0 future price on bitcoin since 8 years ago.
The reasonable interpretation is that the collision attacks on SHA-1 and the shortcomings of binary elliptic curves are going to undermine bitcoin in the end. It may take a while.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Other than the fact that after the 1637 crash I guess you could plant the bulb or maybe even cook it and eat it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
A node can run with only recent blocks, as long as the other data is available on the network.
If could be made prunable; just copy the oldest blocks worth of unchanged balances into the top blocks, then you can discard the oldest blocks.
Or even a Distributed Hash Table system to store older blocks.
Takes energy, water, fertilizer, time, etc - not at all free to create and actually more involved than just being a mining rig you just plug in. You can "split" them by reproducing them via seeds. But yes, it doesn't fit in a regular sized wallet, so I guess that is the distinction. Gold bars also don't fit in the wallet. The dot-com stocks had the form factor same as bitcoins however. Hmmm....
Takes energy, water, fertilizer, time, etc - not at all free to create
Admittedly not completely free, but really cheap. And most importantly, there's no reason for the trade price to go much above the cost to grow one, which puts a natural ceiling on the bulb's prices. And while you can plug in the mining rig, you still need to pay for electricity and the equipment itself, and those costs go up with the price of bitcoin.
You can "split" them by reproducing them via seeds.
I was talking about splitting in the context of producing change for a transaction, or combining small amounts of change in order to make a bigger transaction.
this is starting to look like the whole housing loan market scheme.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Why do costs of operating a mining rig go up as the price of bitcoins goes up? Do you claim bitcoin is driving electricity prices? Do you think that PC's and GPU card prices are driven by bitcoins much?
I know the unmitigated yahoos running CBOE's back-end.
Very "Let's do THIS!", then toss on a bunch of half-assed implementation, and then flipping a nut when things don't go as they imagined.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There, I said it; nothing bad happened to me. It's OK to point and laugh now.
Why do costs of operating a mining rig go up as the price of bitcoins goes up?
Because the amount of Bitcoin that can be mined is fixed at 1800 per day.
As the price of bitcoin goes up, more people will start running a mining rig (or expanding it if they already had one). As the total mining hashrate goes up, the protocol will increase the difficulty level to bring the rewards back to 1800 BTC/day. This means that the difficulty (and therefore the operating cost) will tend to an equilibrium with the price.
Do you know many average Joes buying $17000 future contracts?
No, these futures are to attract bigger capital. And if they succeed, we're in for one hell of a global economic crash when the bubble does burst. Imagine the hindsight on that one.
By "average joe" I meant people with traditional trading accounts. I should have been more clear. People who have accumulated wealth but the only way they invest it is through a brokerage house. There are a *lot* of people like that. People who love to jump on bandwagons when they hear about the latest thing. Such as those who clamor to get in on a hot IPO, for example. They have enough money to move the markets (for a while). Generally they don't do well in their trades.
I didn't say these were designed for that type of investor, of course they're designed for the real money, but an early push will come from the unsophisticated.
And you're right, if and when it collapses the hindsight will be tremendous, with people calculating how much they could have made by shorting at just the right time. It's so easy after the fact, but wallet-busting beforehand.
Indeed, I've been sure to have spotted the top multiple times. Each time I sold a fraction, but fortunately kept some in case I was wrong. I don't have nearly as much profit as I could have had, but I'll certainly keep a healthy profit no matter what happens.
These are cash settled futures on BTC (a financial derivative) as such no BTC is actually changing hands.
Furthermore, on actual BTC exchanges trades are done off block chain. Your BTC ownership only recorded to the blockchain once you withdraw it from the exchange.
The federal and state governments are each considered sovereign, within their respective jurisdictions.
"Big Men???" keep on turning
Carry on like boys of sin
Singing songs about the teen-girls
He rapes 'ole' 'bamy once again and He likes 'em young
Well I heard Mister Moore deny about her
Well I heard ole Roy put her down
Well, I hope Roy Moore will remember
A southern folk don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama
Where the guys have not a clue (apparently)
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, it's startin' smell like poo
In Ole 'Bamy they love the POTUS, boo-hoo-hoo
Now we all did what we could do
Now Pussy-Gate does not bother 'em
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies WERE so blue
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, can not these people be true?
Now GOP has got Deniers
And they've been known to twist the truth
Lord they make nearly vomit
They lie and cheat and steal, now how bout you?
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies CAN BE AGAIN so blue
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, I promise to make it for YOU!
That's all you can do. You got to take a bit off the table from time to time, or else you're just playing the lottery. I bought Apple at $4 a share pre-split. And I don't mean just the most recent 7-1 split, I mean all the splits. If I had kept it all I would now have more money than I could possibly spend. But I didn't. How could I?