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

91–100 of 368 posts

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#91

Post by flignats »

deadmetheny wrote: post #29
virtuexru wrote: post #19

Ah 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

>how much of it will be settled in actual BTC vs USD Exactly none of it, considering that Bitcoin as a currency is fairly useless unless you're buying drugs or you're a botnet operator.

I don't get it - btc is worse than cash for buying drugs and botnets. Cash is anonymous, how do people forget that?

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#92

Post by sidko »

varbo wrote: post #45
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'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.

Here's a list [1] of 400 exchanges you can buy Bitcoin from, 34 of trade BTC/USD. This doesn't include some sites that charge a premium and allow you to buy with debit cards. There are also Bitcoin ATMs, over 1000 of them in the United States [2].

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets [2] https://coinatmradar.com/

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#93

Post by wpietri »

mirimir wrote: post #88
ceejayoz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. It's got a pretty short, volatile history to be deciding that.

Over the past ~7 years, the price has increased by ~10^5. There have been some bubbles, for sure. But all that has paled over the past year. The price could crash, certainly. Still, if futures become available, it could spike a lot higher before it does.

And this is exactly what makes it a terrible store of value. As Wikipedia says, "The point of any store of value is risk management due to a stable demand for the underlying asset." Stable demand is definitely not a characteristic of Bitcoin.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#94

Post by sjcsjc »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #80
otakucode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah the term hedge fund seems something of a misnomer nowadays.

For anyone interested:

The term "hedge fund" originated from the paired long and short positions that the first of these funds used to hedge market risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_fund

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#95

Post by schmichael »

ohhhlol wrote: post #87
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…

> Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network edit: -3 in an hour, why?

Segwit is used in a small fraction of transactions[0] and SegWit2x was cancelled. While the price has skyrocketed the actual transaction rate has barely moved[1].

[0] http://segwit.party/charts/

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?times...

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#96

Post by copperx »

andrewwharton wrote: post #89
Havoc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think I purchased a month of VPN with like half a bitcoin. Oops. Hindsight 20/20 I guess

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."

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#97

Post by mirimir »

varbo wrote: post #45
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'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.

Create an Electrum wallet. Find a friend who has Bitcoin. Meet for lunch/dinner. They transfer ~70 mBTC to you, with a 1-2 mBTC fee. After 2-3 confirmations, you give them $710-$720 cash. Done.

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#98

Post by zeep »

g09980 wrote: post #73
slg wrote: post #30

There 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.

with Coinbase, the best I could do is buy @ 9400 and sell @ 9800 ...lost money because of their bad servers (for some reason downtime only happens when Bitcoin's value drops a lot)

Re: Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures

#99

Post by eternalban »

g09980 wrote: post #73
slg wrote: post #30

There 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.

> Unfortunately GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time

> Conveniently GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time

Post reply on HN