You, sir, are a thief.  You seem to have stolen my legendary handle 'soy', which in the past had as an icon a photo of me leading a mute burro in the Rockies northwest of Denver in 1985 roughly 9 or 10 months before the Chernobyl meltdown.

soy (aka soy39)

Yes.  I see the esendy icon that isn't mine.  My icon was of myself in 1985 leading a burro w/backpack in the Rocky Mountains to pan gold.  Half starving, I was thin and well tanned.  Hell, I should pack this in and head for Alaska.

I agree entirely with Elon Musk taking Tesla private for the reason futures trading gets blocked.  I wish there was some way to ban bitcoin futures trading.

According the the wikipedia it seems clear that the tulip bubble was killed by the Dutch start of tulip futures trading.  Heck the tulip bubble might have been created for that purpose, busting it.

The wikipedia says that the Japanese then took the futures idea and used it to provide a guaranteed rice income to the Samurai.  The Samurai had an annual rice payment that sometime suffered from poor harvests and the elite Samurai were then protected. 

Futures trading seem to steadily pump wealth out of whatever it subjects.  If bitcoin futures trading guarantees a btc income then the pumping out of wealth since bitcoin futures start is explained while the rest of us see a guaranteed downward slope.  And the fantastic blurbs about how it can reach astounding heights are bogus to keep us from bailing and keep holdrs put.

What would the stock market be like without futures trading?  No betting against?  They'd have to struggle to find which will be the best above others.  Betting against what they can manipulate would not be an option.  When the whole stock market drops they'd see no profit in it.

I see the downward slope of bitcoin value is again steadily down as it mostly has been since 12/17/2017.  But there are up jumps!  Still, the wealth is getting pumped out or put back in at a lower rate for many more btc.  The transfer of wealth to the futures traders.

I'd been posting as soy for a long time until late last summer or so.  I became blocked from logging into bitcointalk.org on all my machines.  Desperate I created soy39, the handle I'm using now.  Every once in a while I try soy again and it's blocked.  How can I go back to soy from soy39?  What was the problem that had that locked out?  I'm pretty sure I didn't break any rules.

soy39

Is there a chart that lists all cryptocoins and clearly shows which are subject to futures contracts and which are not?

I'd like a crypto coin that is not subject to futures contracts, can be mined, and like bitcoin will have an absolute limit on how many of that coin will ever exist.  Like bitcoin before 12/17/17.

It could be a store of value if it wasn't subject to futures contracts and that's capacity to make money betting against bitcoin without even buying. 

Why does it need to have utility apart from its capacity to move wealth easily avoiding bank charges.  If by utility it needs to be easy to buy a cup of coffee with it I disagree.  Although it's egalitarian in nature, avoiding brokers, it isn't simple and it relies on faith.  Faith that their money won't just go poof or that its value won't drop like a blimp with a hole where the naysayers are sucking out value making money betting against.

I expect the government will see a nice tax bump from hodl-ers having cashed out.  So, the CFTC, an agency of the US government, must have been wearing a cheshire grin when approving bitcoin futures contracts trading.

Would you say it's a bull market for bitcoin futures and a bear for bitcoin itself?

And "Futures contracts give traders a way to bet on bitcoin prices and earn profits without buying the actual cryptocurrency." a businessinsider.com bullet point before futures launch.  Another bullet point on that page "The Chicago Mercantile Exchange says it will launch its bitcoin futures contracts on December 18."  So, they could beat bitcoin all to hell without ever buying any.

Okay, so maybe the banks aren't afraid of bitcoin.  I can recall around 1986 there were a great many complaints from Central and South American countries that their debts to the US were impossible to pay.  I'd guessed how that came about and figured banks wanted to dump money to reduce availability so sold the governments on borrowing.  Figured that the banks had too much money for some reason relating to the Arab oil embargo not all that many years before.  That perhaps the higher petroleum prices saw the Arabs dumping money into US banks.  I wondered because Mexico had built copper smelters along their northern border that were suddenly polluting north as far as Wyoming, causing acid rain that measurably changed the lakes causing defects in frogs as a for instance.  Not an accident.  But I was wrong as to how those Central and South American debts came about and only realized that after reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.  The countries were sold huge construction projects, dams, power plants, etc.  That's what the money was spent on although the banks profited from the loans.  Those are huge debts and I doubt Bitcoin's market cap compares.  So, the invasion of the US by Central and South American refugees might have its roots in that debt.  The social inequalities and violence that triggered that migration may partly be intentional as payback for that bank debt.

Okay, one took one's money out of bitcoin while it was dropping steadily with plans to buy when one's best guess is it won't go lower or has already started to rise.  That's the thing.  With the swings the value takes it's apparent big money can do what it pleases to the value pretty much.  One guesses wrong, buys and it plummets because they can do that.  So, the power cost of mining in low-energy-cost-countries is not an unreasonable low ball guess.   Above that they have a cushion to work with to transfer wealth to themselves.  But for that reason, that it's obvious, it probably won't go that low.

The guys who have always liked to make money and ready to fight about it ask what do ya need and can't do without.  Housing, winter heating oil, urban garbage collection.  Not the  kind of financial opportunities one would make a short term investment in while waiting for a solid change in bitcoin value.

So, if power cost is a defining factor for the near future of the absolute lowest value Bitcoin might reach, what's to drive it up?  And anti-US sentiment will allow the price to drop and bad actors will put the price down there for the cheap energy country miners.  Maybe it will stabilize and rise with dollar inflation.  But that's the value storage idea that appears to be getting killed so they'd counter that if they can.  When mining reward halves again the price will rise but not double.  That there are more living college graduates in the US than there will ever be Bitcoins means that every US college graduate can't each own one.  That's the kind of thing that can take hold of the imagination and drive demand.  So, the future is in question.

When I took Economics nights at a local college in the mid-70's although the course covered the IMF and World Bank, no mention was made of the IMM.  Futures trading was left out of the 917 page text although some mention of the Chicago Mercantile futures was made in class.

So, futures contracts trading sounds a lot like the application of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace as espoused by the rumored Mafia bookkeeper/economist.

Of course, but when's the right time to buy?  Looking at how low it can be allowed to go with mining costs as a major mitigating factor, that prediction of $2800 a month or so ago sounds about right to kill mining in the US and still allow mining in low energy cost countries for the dwindling number of bitcoins that will ever be mined.  That's not to say they, those mining in low energy cost countries, are driving the value down but that their bitcoins can be used to counter the drive down by bad actors with malicious intent and an incriminating history

I like Google and Musk.  Early on I made a conscious decision to trust Google searches.  I still do.

There's an article on today's Hacker News called Elon Musk vs. Short sellers.  The author says he has nothing against short sellers, that people should be able to bet against a stock as well as for.

That said, under Profit and Beyond the author says:     "The thing is though, I think when Elon Musk looks around, he realizes the greatest threat to his company is not the Mission E or Model 3 take rate or whatever. It is the massive amount of capital betting against him steered by bad actors with malicious intent and an incriminating history."

The same with Bitcoin.

Did I mention that early in my Bitcoin days I tried selling on a downtrend to buy when it started to rise.  It was during an early pump and dump.  I lost a couple of hundred dollars if I remember correctly and decided then to just hold.  Really developed a low opinion of pump and dumpers with that my first experience with them.

I don't agree with the author's opinion that betting against a stock is okay.

But I'm not halfway through the article: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/elon-musk-vs-short-sellers.118431/

And the reason this should worry us is that if something is a financial threat, buy it, own it, change it?

I think the point is that it could have been real.  Somewhere that belief Bitcoin was a place to put money in bad times was killed.  Maybe it was the MtGox theft.  But at one time a real continued rise to great numbers could have been possible and some of us who had been around for the $100 -> $1000 rise believed it was happening.  Those of us not stock/bond market analysts.  That it was a deliberate pump to 12/17/17 then a really disheartening decline was intentional by those who knew of the tulip bust, that arguably from tulip futures.  The bigger picture of financial analysts isn't visible to me but it didn't include Bitcoin remaining a 'store of value' of any consequence.

Lets not talk as if Wall Street traders only just got into cryptcurrencies.  If they weren't in very quickly I'd be shocked.  That to earlier posts in the thread.

You say it should've been around only 10k.  I remember when Bitcoin when to $100 and speculation that it would hit $1k by year's end seemed outlandish.  

That the great migration of wealth upward to the top 1% or 2% in our lifetimes has been so pervasive in every country of the world that the idea of Bitcoin with its absolute limited number of coins could very well have caused it to pass $20k, $50k, $100k - a fig to the powers that be.

Home is where the heart is.  So traders into cryptocurrency will be prone to make money weakening Bitcoin.  After all, their 401ks aren't seeing contributions from crypto.

Personally I most remember the surge to Bitcoin when there were international difficulties and Bitcoin was touted as where to put one's money in troubled times.  But that got killed somehow and I don't quite know how that happened or by whom.

So, I expected that ordinary citizens in countries where retirees are seeing entry level personnel starting wage at close to what the retirees made going out, currency devalued, those ordinary citizens would put their money where Bitcoin's absolute limited quantity works against inflation.  And I expected that idea to spread and swell.

But regarding Bitcoin and Bitcoin Futures contracts and the effect of negative press for profit.  Cryptocurrency in itself is impossible for some to accept or even fathom.  So, bad press for the sake of profit would hit cryptocurrencies harder than say some utility futures, not that utility futures would expect bad press as some very difficult types control energy and the press.



And how does that differ from buying Bit20 coins in bulk?