Thinking about it more I would expect the opposite.
I.e. there would be an imbalance of people wanting to sell Rubles to buy USDT/BTC/Eth etc... as a currency hedge/escape route.

But this discount is implying the opposite...

Arh - so does it imply that exporters are using Binance to convert USD->RUB as I am assuming this just became hard. So happy to pay 10% to do this?
So effectively Binance is being used (in a very small way - RUB volumes are tiny millions a day not billions) to avoid sanctions?

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/USDT_RUB?layout=pro

USDT/RUB is at 98.82 when the FX Spot is about 108.

Why?

Anyone got any ideas? What does it mean?

As is a nice arbitrage if you have a RUB bank account and can FX RUB->USD and transfer the USD back onto Binance.

Or are Binance restricting RUB withdrawals?

So can only mean there is a lot of crypto holders who want RUB in a bank account. Which seems odd to me... would expect there to be the opposite at the moment...

A Bear Bitcoin ETF would not be such a bad bet.

As assuming it tracked bitcoins using the CME futures there is a 10-20% per year roll benefit.

Meaning that the ETF return would not be the same a -BTC price but would be -BTC price +15% per year.

So as long a Bitcoin went up by less than 15% a year you would make money. So you are betting Bitcoin will below $100k in 3 years time.

A brave bet but not an unreasonable one.

Dec13->Dec17 it went from $1000 to $700

It buys CME Futures... and these settle on day of expiry to the price of bitcoin. So its price WILL move with bitcoin.
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.quotes.html

Only issue is that every month it has to sell the current month and buy the following month - and these are currently about 1% more expensive than spot!

So the ETF will return same as bitcoin less 12-15% per year. So I agree not great - when you can just download some free software and buy the real thing for 0.1% commission!



Remember that for every buyer of a future on CME there is a seller. And those sellers are going to be exposed to the inverse of the bitcoin price. Generally they will hedge this by buying real bitcoins.
So effectively every $1 invested in the ETF means someone else buys $0.98 of bitcoin.

Look at:
https://accounts.profunds.com/etfdata/ByFund/BITO-psdlyhld.xls

almost hit the 2000 futures limit on CME on day 1!

OMG! That has got to be the most successful ETF launch ever! Assets grew from $20m -> $590m in one DAY.

And it is almost hitting the CME position limit of 2000 futures....

That is 10x bigger than I was expecting.

https://accounts.profunds.com/etfdata/ByFund/BITO-psdlyhld.xls

Did anyone validate this chart? It is using 31st Dec prices for each year?

Just bet if you picked the highest price in each year to buy and the lowest in the later year to sell could come up with a very different conclusion.

To date - timing is everything...

https://accounts.profunds.com/etfdata/ByFund/BITO-psdlyhld.xls

Interesting to see now that increases today...

Put your best guess below on total Asset Value of the new ETF at end of day 1 of trading!
https://www.proshares.com/funds/bito_related_materials.html

$65m is my guess!

I believe this is a Futures Backed ETF?

So can't see it becoming very popular - as will effectively have a 12-15% annual fee due to the cost of the futures rolls.
And if it gets to any size will hit the CME position limits (2000 contracts - 10k BTC - $600m).
https://www.cmegroup.com/market-regulation/position-limits.html

See:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5365787.0
for my logic for the 12%.

But can't see a Futures based ETF getting many investors - as Futures Roll is so expensive going to track BTC price less 12-15% a year (or worse if holds large proportion of open interest). Very expensive when compared to a physical ETF that can easily have less than 1% costs.

See:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5365787.0
for logic.

I ask this as everyone is very excited about a futures backed ETF. But due to the roll cost is not going to track BTC price - but is going to track its price less 12% (+fees) per year!

You can see this from CME quotes:
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.quotes.html#

Looking at right now:
Oct 21: 60285
Nov21: 61035

So if you are a futures back ETF what you do is you buy the nearby future - so in this case the Oct21. Then over a period of about a week at the end of the month you gradually sell your Oct21 futures and buy the Nov21 futures. But here you see the problem - you are selling low and buying high - you just lost $750 vs your benchmark of BTC price - over 1%. And you have to do this every month!

Obviously you could instead buy the Dec22 future so you do not have to roll for 14 months. But that has zero liquidity (open interest is 1!), and was $3510 more that the Oct 21 future at the last close - but due to lack of liquidity would have to pay a lot more for it if bought in volume. So this would probably be even worse.


So WHY is the roll so expensive when you could do a risk free arbitrage I hear you ask!

Problem is the arbitrage is very capital intensive. Take now arb would be:
Buy 5BTC @ 60k = $300k
Sell 1 Future @ $60,285 (you just made a $1,425 paper profit by the end of the month!).
But to buy the future you need to lodge $101,842 of margin at CME (initial might be 10% more than this):
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.margins.html
And you need cash at hand - as you are short and if the futures price increases you need to lodge more margin fast or the CME will close your position.

So this arb you need $450k (50k for some liquidity to cover margin calls - I assume if you need more could close out position) in CASH.
And you are making $750 * 5 * 12 = 45k a year. So a 10% return - but needs to be carefully managed to be sure if BTC price spike CME does not close you out - exposing you to the crash just after the spike - as you are now naked long BTC - and this could easily wipe out years of profits.

Now you might be able to borrow some money from someone and lodge the 5 BTC as collateral which would reduce your capital need and increase return - but not sure who would take on this loan!

Remember with lighting the case is very different to a "normal" user.

With lighting you can be in a situation where you MUST get your transaction confirmed in a block within a certain number of blocks or the other side of the channel "could" steel all you coins.
So the downside of underestimating is not just the inconvenience of having to wait - but could be loss of all the funds in the channel.
In this situation saving a few sat may not be worth the risk.

Although for a Mutual close should not be the case!

gmaxwell - do you think that many pools are reliant on patched bitcoind nodes to maximise their profits (since most are pps - it is their profit not the miners that is impacted by orphans/empty block trade-off).

Those 20 pools are arguably the most critical users of bitcoin core. And should it not include every possible optimisation (even if at expense of SPV) to ensure they run vanilla code. As that then ensures that future soft/hard forks go smoothly as those 20 users just have to do an upgrade from version 2x ->2y - rather than having to try to merge in some old patch and try to test it works as expected.

Or is issue that those patches are proprietary and what gives them their competitive advantage.

I guess since the pools are operating off 2.5% margin on pps - it magnifies by a factor of 40 P&L impact of orphans.

And technically even after it has locked in we have to wait till November before the 1st tx's and so the 1st Blocks with it in.

Up to that point if a majority of the miners downgraded (or never actually upgraded - just signalled) it would not manage to actually maintain the longest chain so if someone published a currently valid tx that was invalid under taproot we would have a chain split... (I think I am right on this?)

So if you enjoy a good conspiracy theory can run with that scenario... which really would be chaos... BitcoinCash/SV all over again but with Core having the lower hash rate - and nobody maintaining longest chains codebase!

Looks like we are there! 

BTC.com has signalled with all of their last 7 blocks!

So assuming no miner changes their mind will lockin around the Sat 12th June.

I think the percentage on the taproot.watch site is calculated by looking at the percentage of blocks each pool has produced in this period (its % hash rate).

It then sums the % hash rate (over the current period) of all the pools that signalled on their LAST block.

So is effectively forward looking.

But annoyingly BTC.COM has only partly upgraded their infrastructure. So only about 1/3 of their blocks are signalling. They count for about 10% hash rate.

If their last block was a signalling block their 10% is included (so jumps to 94%) if their last block was not signalling they are not included so rate drops to 84%.

I think BTC.com said on twitter they should be signalling full time by end of this week. Assuming they do then is a dead cert for next period - otherwise will be very tight!

I think we are there!

All 11 of the top 11 pools are signalling with all blocks. As are 3 other smaller pools.
So voting over 94%.

Assuming no pool changes its mind, and there is no shift in miners to non-signalling pools then lock-in around the 11/12th June is certain to happen.

BTC.TOP signalling too - so now all of the top 12 pools have signalled one or more blocks - so if they all signal full time up at about 95%.