Live data from Hacker News

Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

bloomberg.com

301–310 of 368 posts

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#301
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…

Have you checked out the Bitcoin Cash community on r/BTC? There’s plenty of hatred for Core developers on there, but there’s also a lot of grassroots projects going on, like the Bitcoin Cash Fund that recently raised about $85k to fund projects that spread adoption of Bitcoin Cash — feels a lot more like the early days. https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...

Bcash is just a pump and dump

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#302
post #229
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…

> Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.

That's the puzzling part. A lot of work has gone into Stake / Mixed proof chains that don't depend on consuming horrendous amounts of energy. There isn't a good reason to expect money not to shift to more efficient ledgers when things settle down.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#303
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently there have been cash-settled futures on a whole bunch of commodities for years now, so this sounds like another case of "I just discovered how finance works and I don't like it".

Bitcoin differs from commodities like gold in that it's something which can be trivially transferred electronically. It doesn't make much sense to 'buy' cash instruments when you can just get the real thing.

> It doesn't make much sense to 'buy' cash instruments when you can just get the real thing

It does if you only want to be exposed to price movements. With futures you can get that exposure with a much lower initial outlay than if you bought (or sold) the underlying. Leverage, in other words.

That's pretty much the point of them. Whether it's something that you'd find value in is somewhat beside the point. As well as speculation, I'd expect there is probably a market for people who actually want to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange. The current price fluctuations are a pain in the arse.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since you're dancing around the point so much, I'll be more direct. Here are specific questions that I suspect Coinbase also had:

What vitamin is unavailable in the US but available internationally?

Is said vitamin legal to import to the US?

Why does the vendor not take anything but Bitcoin?

Why can't you wait a couple weeks to get it?

Where were you getting it previously without Bitcoin, given that it's so critical you can't go without?

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#305
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't people in Latin America just buy gold or dollars to store value ? I mean it's a circular argument. To say bitcoin is a store of value, there has to be an apriori reason why it has value. It can't be a store of value because it is. Right ?

It is like if you and I took turns paying for lunch periodically and we used a ledger to track who paid what, and who owes who. The ledger itself is bitcoin. The ledger paper is worthless, but the entries on it "have value." For you and I, the ledger "has value" because that's where the history is. If you printed 50 new blank ledgers, they wouldn't have value because they don't have the history and our mutual agreeme…

WWL, now that’s good...checks domains

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum. Admittedly there's a dark side of scammy ICOs, but there's also lots of open source coding and idealists trying to change the world. I don't think Ethereum is the only cryptocurrency community like this, it's just the one I'm involved in.

Ethereum community is so cool, I envy you can join it with full time:)

What's stopping you?

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#307
post #289

What is the difference between Bitcoin futures and gambling?

It's still gambling in a sense however there is a major difference in the type of randomness you are exposing yourself to. At a casino or when playing cards it's very easy to compute probabilities of all possible events - hence the house always wins. Here in order to compute the probabilities of price movements you'd need to model millions of human agents across dozens of markets. So unless someone has a lot of insider information, you have a decent chance of making some money.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not correct. They still have to pick a settlement price. Physically settled futures makes sense when customers are interested in the commodity itself and cash settled makes more sense for pure speculation.

There are many products that are settled both ways, and some financial futures that are physically settled.

Sure. But physically settled funancial futures such as bond futures are physical because customers actually want to get delivery of the underlying bonds. In the case of bitcoin futures, most likely they don't. Physically settled futures cost the exchange more in terms of additional expenses / infrastructure. So the exchange will go with physical only when there is a clear customer demand for that.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out the Bitcoin Cash community on r/BTC? There’s plenty of hatred for Core developers on there, but there’s also a lot of grassroots projects going on, like the Bitcoin Cash Fund that recently raised about $85k to fund projects that spread adoption of Bitcoin Cash — feels a lot more like the early days. https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...

Bcash is just a pump and dump

How do you define, specifically, a pump and dump vs a legitimate cryptocurrency?

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#310
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…

Nostalgia and technology should'nt walk together.
Post reply on HN