Are futures good or bad for the price?
I thought it was bad. People who want to speculate on price going up now have the option of buying futures, which does not put upward pressure on the price.
So what's happening?
It's actually a good point and one that I hadn't considered, certainly it seems feasible that could happen, as we all know price is driven up by demand, and so given futures won't use any actual bitcoin it could take some of that demand away. The only thing I would say though is that these people would be agreeing to buy at a future price, this price would probably be at a premium to today's price and so they would be losing a bit in that sense, the other difference is that they can't watch the price and make decisions on when to buy or sell as they're fixed in to a term. I think it may take some of the demand away but certainly not all of it, more likely that of some whales.
Also this is just gonna mostly be Wall St people and institutions throwing vast sums of money around in the futures market. Most crypto traders aren't people on Wall St or who hire stock brokers that trade Wall St assets for them. So the vast majority of people who trade on the crypto markets aren't going to care at all about futures. Futures might take away some of the demand that Wall St has to get directly into crypto when they can just try to make all their money by gambling on the price through these futures, but for the average person in crypto or who will get into crypto in the future they're not gonna care about futures, they're still going to want that deflationary asset with rapidly rising demand that could be the future of money. For the non-Wall St person buying and holding is a much simpler, safer, easier, and more monetarily rewarding choice than trying to predict future prices and trade futures on Wall St or having to hire some Wall St broker to do it for them.
And since everyone in the financial industry seems to think that the futures market will eventually lead to hedge funds and ETFs directly buying up Bitcoin, in the long term futures should be very very good for Bitcoin as a gateway into the mainstream BIG investment money.
