Holding on to the .25 BTC I bought for $20 while rubbing my hands together and whispering "yes, yes"
Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
71–80 of 368 posts
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins. They are a pretty miserable company. How can they claim to sell something "useful" then ban you if you mention using it? They basically are admitting to selling a security if that is the case..wondering if we could take all the nonsensically banned users and do a class action lawsuit against them. It would be one t…
> Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins. You don't see how that might be a red flag? What vitamins could possibly be so important that you couldn't wait a little while, and would be unavailable from another source? Plus, the rudeness of "I'm more important than everyone else in the queue, hurry up" can't have helped.
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".
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#73There was a 4 hour stretch this morning in which Bitcoin lost over 20% of its value. In the last 45 minutes it is up 13%. I wonder what a long straddle would cost on this thing.
Bitcoin has recovered from dips really well in the past weeks due to major buy pressure. Unfortunately GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time this time around, making it impossible to buy the dip.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#74Ah yes Bitcoin; the completely useless electricity waster is finally hitting Wall St. I wonder how the futures will affect price & how much of it will be settled in actual BTC vs USD. AM I DOING THIS RIGHT HACKER NEWS? LUL
One person’s useless is another’s breakthrough, critical mass solution to one of humanity’s oldest and most fundamental problems: tracking who has/owes what.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins. You don't see how that might be a red flag? What vitamins could possibly be so important that you couldn't wait a little while, and would be unavailable from another source? Plus, the rudeness of "I'm more important than everyone else in the queue, hurry up" can't have helped.
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.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#76Can an expert explain for the less informed: * Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity? * Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
> Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity? Kind of. It doesn't necessarily stabilize the prices of the commodity so much as allow the transferring of the risk associated with price movements. > Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)? The exchange acting as the clearing house is on the other side of each contract so…
> What's particularly cool / safe (and interesting if you're a finance nut) about futures vs. actual trading of Bitcoins is that there is zero crypto involved. Everything is cash settled in dollars.
I certainly find this interesting, but I don't think it's a good vote of confidence for Bitcoin just yet, even if it's structurally safer for the exchange. For the most part futures are not cash-settled, or only cash-settled when it is very inconvenient for the buyer or exchange to settle them physically. If you buy futures, you are usually trying to gain speculative exposure to something that is otherwise very difficult to hold (e.g. oil futures vs oil barrels).
If there is no structural obstacle to settling futures physically, that implies there is another reason the market or the exchange doesn't particularly want to. This can mean various things; in the case of Bitcoin futures specifically, I interpret this to mean that the exchange would rather not handle Bitcoin directly, because historically holding a large amount of Bitcoin at once invites hackers to try and steal them.
That's pretty savvy and does seem good for overall safety, but from the perspective of financial stability, I think it's bad for Bitcoin's overall market confidence long term. My concern is that since Bitcoin is convenient to purchase and trade directly through existing exchanges, people who are long on Bitcoin should just buy Bitcoin directly, instead of Bitcoin futures.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shit, somebody gave me 0.05 BTC a few years ago to go to a talk about what it was all about. Hopefully I still have that paper wallet, it must be worth close to $500
I got .20-someodd (.28, maybe? Maybe have even been in the .3 range.) years ago from spigots and a very brief experiment with mining, then thoughtlessly formatted right over the damn hard drive with the wallet on it and went "oh well, not like it's worth anything". Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a sh…
Probably. I actually wrote one about half a decade ago, though I'm not sure how well it works with recent or really old versions of the software: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#78Can an expert explain for the less informed: * Do futures markets typically stabilize the price of a commodity? * Who loses out if a futures contract can't be fulfilled (for example due to lack of liquidity in the underlying market)?
I think it kind of does, in a way. Let's say I go long on bitcoin, but purchase futures that are short on it. If bitcoin plummets, I may lose on the bitcoin position, but the futures I purchased will go up, limiting my losses. Southwest did something similar with oil a few years ago. Fuel is one of the biggest costs to an airline, so when the price of oil spiked a few years ago, many airlines had to raise ticket pric…
That's called 'hedging' and is literally all hedge funds do. So long as markets remain 'sensible' its a brilliant strategy. Markets, of course, do not remain sensible for long. I'm presently listening to 'When Genius Failed', a book about the implosion and utter failure of Long Term Capital Management, one of the biggest hedge funds who learned just how utterly batshit irrational the market can actually be.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#79Man, 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…
> As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles
I'm not so sure about that. You could have bought BTC anytime before the past week or so and it would have appreciated significantly, regardless of whether you bought it in a peak or trough. It's just a question of magnitude. E.g. if you bought 1 BTC at the lowest or highest price in 2015 you would still have outrageous returns on it today.
This is not to say it will continue being the case going forward but it's crazy to look back at.
Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it kind of does, in a way. Let's say I go long on bitcoin, but purchase futures that are short on it. If bitcoin plummets, I may lose on the bitcoin position, but the futures I purchased will go up, limiting my losses. Southwest did something similar with oil a few years ago. Fuel is one of the biggest costs to an airline, so when the price of oil spiked a few years ago, many airlines had to raise ticket pric…
That's called 'hedging' and is literally all hedge funds do. So long as markets remain 'sensible' its a brilliant strategy. Markets, of course, do not remain sensible for long. I'm presently listening to 'When Genius Failed', a book about the implosion and utter failure of Long Term Capital Management, one of the biggest hedge funds who learned just how utterly batshit irrational the market can actually be.
> That's called 'hedging' and is literally all hedge funds do.
Uhhh, no