One thing I haven’t seen getting enough attention is the interest rate you pay for the loan implicit in taking out a leveraged position.
For a future with a fixed expiration date, you can easily compute the implied rate by looking at the basis and time to expiry. Back around 5 years ago, you could lock in 80% or so interest p.a. risk free [1] by buying Bitcoin and shorting the future (eg on BitMEX).
Everyone else that was yoloing long the future paid that (somewhat hidden) rate.
With a perpetual, you can’t lock in the rate (until the expiry, as you can on an ordinary future), but it depends on the funding paid (every 8 hours) over that period. It might well be the same, but would basically depend on the long or short sentiment of the crowd, integrated over that period.
At any rate, seems like most people ignore that substantial cost (which was and presumably is arb’ed and exploited by more sophisticated players fleecing the plebs).
[1] “risk free” modulo exchange/ops risk, which is substantial as FTX and others demonstrated.