Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 368 posts

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#191

Post by goldenkey »

ceejayoz wrote: post #172
goldenkey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually was vitamins from a foreign shop that took international payments thru bitcoin. I could have shown them if they wanted proof. However they never let me have any recourse. Just instaban, goodbye. As hard as it might be to believe its their job to remain professional. And they failed at that. My account didn't get flagged - I got outright banned- lets not mince words. Coinbase is ran by a bunch of assholes.

It's also their job not to get the company shuttered for knowingly allowing drug money to flow through their books. If it's weird to me that you need to buy vitamins from a foreign company using Bitcoin (you couldn't get them for a month or two from a provider who takes PayPal/CC, and you couldn't go without for a little while?!), it's going to be really weird to the compliance department of a financial institution r…

Its common for international shops to use Bitcoin. And its common for people to buy home vitamins and supplements, foods, etc.. from their ethnic countries of origin, because they are difficult to find anywhere else. Who exactly determines what someone buying bitcoin is allowed to use it for? If I want to trade it for vitamins or russian crackers or chocolate, am I now banned? Think about what you are saying -- that Bitcoin should be restricted to merely a speculation vehicle. Coinbase seems to have that opinion opaquely -- they function as more of a gambling/security sales portal in that case. And they should be held to the standards of that sector given their rather overt bans where users state a rather innocuous intention to use the Bitcoin for bartering.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#192

Post by chrisan »

copperx wrote: post #96
andrewwharton wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We've been cruising past orders of magnitude ($0.10 > $1 > $10 > $100 > $1000 > $10000) and at any one of those jumps it seemed like the top of a bubble and just as likely to go in the opposite direction with the same velocity. Don't kick yourself for spending when you did, because as I'm sure you're aware, it's just as likely that you could be now saying "Thank goodness I u…

"I don't regret being a millionaire, and you shouldn't either."

Its still the right attitude to have or else every hindsight choice is going to be regret, and we'll be talking trillionaires. No one can predict the future. It could have gone down to 0.10 instead of up to 1000. Should everyone buy in now and expect the value to go up to 20k?

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#193

Post by SilasX »

PhrosTT wrote: post #82
varbo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time. Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.

For the record Coinbase is adding 100k users a day. So people need to dial down the expectations...

Down? They've had tons of money and time since June[1] to scale up to handle much larger volume. They don't have a real excuse for these major outages. I got a recruiter email but didn't want to go near them because of how flaky they apparently are.

(Gemini has been much better but they went down for a lot of today too.)

[1] When they had ~4 volume related outages.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#194

Post by turkeytotal »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #34
fragsworth wrote: post #11

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…

I disagree completely. Cash settled futures let people bet on bitcoin without ever touching bitcoin itself. For example, suppose I am a huge bitcoin hater and want to bet that bitcoin will go down 100% in the next 3 months. Why force me to worry about wallets, etc.? I just want to have a way to express my conviction without messing with all that stuff.

On principle I agree, however Bitcoin poses additional complexities that other commodities do not, specifically in regards to contentious netsplits that result in irreconcilable forks (which may or may not be fighting for the name Bitcoin). In the event of a netsplit, barring physical delivery of actual outputs (private keys, not a settlement transaction), CME has the power to dictate which is settled and even which fork gets the BTC ticker for in-flight contracts. This gives CME quite a bit of influence in the outcome of a fork; for example, what would CME have called Bitcoin if their futures were live during the 2x hard fork? If they were swayed by some of the larger players in the space, this could cause serious consequences for the wider network (confusion, loss of funds and other moral hazards).

This is one of the complexities of the ETF filings, where the filers stated their intention to determine which fork the ETF represented by things like hashpower, market cap or other temporal data points. This is dangerous for many reasons, thus it is best for the contracts to represent all possible future forks and not make a decision on them, allow the private keys to be delivered and allow the party who the coins are delivered to take split as they see fit. While this condition could be represented in a cash settled contract, there are infinite possible forks and CME could not possibly keep up with them all, thus the only practical way to solve the problem is physical delivery of private keys.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#195

Post by SilasX »

ceejayoz wrote: post #75
stale2002 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be rude, but honestly a company should be expected to deal with rude customers. It is their job to do deal with slightly rude customers, and I don't think they should be banning anybody for something so small as "being asked to go faster".

The rudeness can't have helped, but I'd imagine the "I desperately need my 'vitamins' that can only be bought with Bitcoin" bit is what got the account flagged.

Right, but (without knowing any more details about the case), I'd hope they needed more than that one thing to "nope" him away.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#196

Post by [deleted] »

swalsh wrote: post #46
mads wrote: post #35

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 sol…

I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles (which admittedly is when the majority of people get in), it's been pretty good at more or less maintaining its value. As a non-physical thing, it's a…

[deleted]

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#197

Post by xtian »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #176
ncallaway wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I move a rock from my left to my right does the rock weight more? Just because a physical thing changes state doesn't mean it weights more.

> If I move a rock from my left to my right does the rock weight more? It does to your left and your right. If I have a piece of paper with a one on it, and another one with a zero on it, and I exchange them. Do they weigh differently? Its a bit surprising that I'm being downvoted on a tech forum for asserting that information doesn't have weight.

> Its a bit surprising that I'm being downvoted on a tech forum for asserting that information doesn't have weight.

You are being downvoted for espousing an erroneous definition of the word "physical".

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#198

Post by cwkoss »

amenghra wrote: post #189
cwkoss wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. I think a lot of people hear "Digital Currency" and think 'something like Apple Pay', when Bitcoin's competition is closer to ACH/wire transfers. It's not a tech that everyone needs to use, and most people will pay an expert to use it for them. But if successful, could be a valuable medium for receiving payments from low-trust entities. For example, if a stock exchange accepted Bitcoin for fundi…

The reason things take days to clear is not because the underlying money moving rails are slow. If/when your stock exchange starts accepting bitcoins, they may still continue to take days to clear things.

For what reason do you think a stock exchange would want to add artificial delay to Bitcoin deposits?

I could see holding a portion as 'pending' until many confirmations, or perhaps until the Bitcoin can be liquidated on the market, but both of those seem like they could still resolve an order of magnitude faster than the 'competition'.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#199

Post by bochoh »

lsseckman wrote: post #187
bochoh wrote: post #163

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.

Price wouldn’t drop unless you actually sold.

The trick here is that the whale does sell but profits in Fiat. Then using those profits you can buy the now cheaper Bitcoin. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#200

Post by amenghra »

cwkoss wrote: post #198
amenghra wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason things take days to clear is not because the underlying money moving rails are slow. If/when your stock exchange starts accepting bitcoins, they may still continue to take days to clear things.

For what reason do you think a stock exchange would want to add artificial delay to Bitcoin deposits? I could see holding a portion as 'pending' until many confirmations, or perhaps until the Bitcoin can be liquidated on the market, but both of those seem like they could still resolve an order of magnitude faster than the 'competition'.

The very same reasons they have delays right now. Institutions are able to move money pretty quickly and cheaply between themselves.

The reason you don’t get that as an end user is because of compliance, fraud, etc.

Post reply on HN