
Bitcoin Futures Will Be Allowed to Start Trading - bitdiddle
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/bitcoin-futures-will-be-allowed-to-start-trading
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bitdiddle
According to Bloomberg, margin requirements are going to be quite high in
order to keep bitcoin trading from creating issues.

If you can trade bitcoin futures in Chicago, to me that says regulation is
coming, and even central bank involvement. Seems to go against the grain of
what bitcoin pretends to be about.

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vasilipupkin
Nah. You are reading too much into it. Futures are just a way to bet on
bitcoin without touching bitcoin itself

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lucozade
Yes and no. The (delightfully named) bitdiddle may have a point.

Although the CME futures will be cash settled so Bitcoin will not be
_directly_ involved, it's not clear what would happen if there was evidence of
price manipulation.

For example, if there is an anomalous spike on a stock exchange around the
time of the futures mark, this is always investigated.

If a similar thing occurred on, say, GDAX (which will be included in the
benchmark), it's not clear what that would trigger. It's possible that the
answer is nothing (there are futures on Libor after all) but it doesn't
require much tinfoil to see this as a possible point of attack.

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vasilipupkin
Sure, but price manipulation is already illegal, so those investigations are
coming with or without the futures.

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lucozade
My point is that, just because the futures are not directly linked to Bitcoin,
they can still have a direct effect.

And I'm not suggesting that they're listing futures in order to attack
Bitcoin. I have no reason to believe that.

However, it is notoriously hard to prove general price manipulation. It is
much easier, and more common, to prove specific price manipulation. In
practice this usually means an extraordinary anomaly e.g. a flash crash or a
targeted anomaly. The latter is almost always due to a specific event such as
a rate setting or a close price.

