I hope you own yourself some Bitcoin or, as we’re fond of calling it, “make-believe space tokens”, because it’s comin’ in hot this morning dammit.
In yet another truly absurd leg higher, the cryptocurrency that sane people love to hate is up above a laughable $6,600 on Wednesday and by God it looks like it wants to go higher still.
This of course comes on the heels of yesterday’s news that CME is about to launch futures for this piece of made-up shit. Here’s BBG’s Camila Russo:
This paves the way for more institutional investors to enter the space. It could open the floodgates to investors who have been standing on the sidelines as bitcoin soared over 500% this year. The CME had prepared for this by starting a bitcoin index last year, and the futures will be settled in cash based on that index. The CBOE said in August it’s also planning to launch bitcoin derivatives and the CFTC registered cryptocurrency trading platform LedgerX as the first federally regulated cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and clearinghouse. With bitcoin futures becoming mainstream, the next logical step seems to be a bitcoin ETF, as the SEC had cited the lack of derivatives as one of the reasons for rejecting approval of the funds. ETFs and derivatives are likely to make bitcoin trading a lot more palatable for hedge funds and mutual funds, as the instruments will allow them to hedge for the digital asset’s volatility and avoid some of the hassles of investing in bitcoin directly.
As of this morning, Bitcoin’s “market cap” is now at a comical $110 billion.
Not too much further now. Only $493,400 to go before John doesn’t have to pull a Steve Bannon on live television:
As DealBreaker’s Owen Davis notes, now that everyone is invited to the party, this could continue for the foreseeable future:
Suffice to say there’s a mass of silently suffering hedgies out there yearning for nothing more than a few measly bps of their firms’ portfolios to be devoted to bitcoin. But one obstacle more than any has made it such a tough sell. Beyond the obvious quibbles — that bitcoin is almostuniversally shunned by banks, near-synonymous with bubble, reminiscent of a pyramid scheme, and pervaded by fraud and manipulation — the only real drawback has been that unless you’re cool with shady exchanges domiciled in weird Balkan states you’ve never heard of, bitcoin couldn’t be reliably hedged. Until now.
I wonder if you have the same disdain for people who registered web addresses they suspected would be popular then sold them to interested parties when they arose. Those too after all were basically “make believe space houses full of nothing”. Owning part of a network regardless of how physical it is can be lucrative if the network is useful, I mean if you were Hillary Clinton why buy HillaryClinton.com when you could just start your own internet instead of paying some guy $20k just because he got there first?
that’s not the same thing.
“Hillary Clinton” or “Donald Trump” or “Ronald Reagan” has actual value.
Bitcoin has no value. It’s a ponzi scheme.
the technology has value. but that technology will be co-opted by governments eventually.
not saying that’s a good thing because invariably, governments will be horribly inefficient with it and they’ll probably bastardize it completely.
but they’ll co-opt it. Bitcoin will go to zero eventually. the technology will survive. Bitcoin won’t.
BitCoin has no technology – anymore than a carpenter does. It uses processes and tools invented by others. It might patent the blockchain processes (but not the blockchain technology) they have adapted to their needs, but process patents are a time a dozen (change one feature and you have a different process), generally impossible to defend and have little if any salable IP value.
BitCoin will make a few of its “musical chairs” traders a lot of money – except those that lose their chairs when the music stops. It’s pure gambling at best.
However, there is some utility to the currency; you can buy drugs and arms in a manner that is very hard to trace (although not impossible). Having said that, tulips had some utility also.
Lmao, heisenberg I respect your articles about traditional finance markets but you lost me at “bitcoin is a ponzi scheme”. Who’s robbing who to pay who exactly here?
H probably c&p that quote from the foot-in-mouth Jamie Dimon.
Hey H, got any insight whether Jamie Diamond will fire himself when his technically insolvent bank delves into bitcoin?
Hey Raj, first of all, I don’t give a shit what you respect or don’t respect, so you can save that bit.
also, when it comes to the pyramid scheme aspect, I’ll let the smartest quant on the street explain everything you need to know here: https://heisenbergreport.com/2017/09/13/bitcoin-meet-gandalf-kolanovic-says-cryptocurrencies-may-be-pyramid-schemes/
Sure, but does BestBuy.com have value before any such company exists? It’s just words. Are you saying words have inherent value and therefore reserving word combinations on the web is inherently valuable and not based in the utility of the network?
Facebook’s code has no inherent value if nobody logs into it. A share of facebooks stock is worth zero is everyone uses google’s clone tomorrow. We all could just do that. In fact let’s all 6 billion of us short facebook and go long google then move platforms.
Government’s might co-opt the code… they sure are experts at security and rapid adaptation… I guess we can all hope no huge breach occurs where someone simply moves everyone’s money around or worse, launches a DDOS attack that cripples the entire country’s centralized digital monetary system. Long term governments are not geared at being tech experts… I mean they still cannot even grasp economics beyond the philosophical stage nevermind actual science like climate change.
I would guess banning it is more likely… but unless the utility is actually negligible… it will outlast any ban. Alcohol didn’t stop getting made during prohibition.
So in other words, bitcoin being a formidable competitor to dollar hegemony (or what remains of it), they’re securitizing bitcoin in order to be able to contain it with fiat via naked shorts much like they did with gold before? This could present a hella good entry pt when the govt tards fuck it up again.