"REX Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF" has recently been filed with the SEC

At this point can we talk about why they will fail? I listened to a few smart people at $7 and every time it bubbled I passed. Lol it's only at $4500+ now. I never would have made 6000% obviously knowing my cash out tendencies, but man I cost myself quite the fortune because "it's a sham and it won't work".

I'd love for the bears to explain it with regards to BTC. The other coins certainly 90%+ have to fail.

Imo the biggest risk to Bitcoin right now is Ethereum flippening. Given current market cap I guesstimate it to be ~50% prob of that happening.

Not very worried about govcoin, more worried about facebookcoin tbh.

pretty much this. just avoid it and use fiat. and you can invest in certain things like govt or fiat payment processors etc but the impact of doing that relative to investing/shorting crypto is orders of magnitude smaller.

Oh yes, guess that might be another way to invest in the possibility that the price of something may fall - by buying put options?

Not sure if they're available for stuff like GBTC though?


Have not tried buying or trading options myself though - have just tried to stick with regular investing in stuff like FB, and that seems to have gone okay ... so far?

AFAIK, there will be 2 expressively federally regulated bitcoin options in the fall- one of them will deliver actual btc to you (ledger X) and the other (cboe) will just be strictly fiat based on settlement of options

The reliability of these products will determine if a bitcoin based ETF will be tradeable in America. If the options prove to be popular, reliable, and robust, you will be able to short BTC directly via ETF. But that itself is probably atleast 1.5 years away and hinges on these options (and other derivatve products down the road) being successful.

Have been trying really hard to keep track of the latest investment stuff, but hadn't heard anything about those new options - guess may wound up missing a nugget or two of interesting news, while was slacking over the summertime

It seems like any time bitcoin takes another step towards mainstream acceptance, the price of it has gone up - wonder if maybe that'll happen again in the fall when the new options go into effect?

Funny how when you think about how to go against bitcoin, it makes bitcoin so appealing. Who the **** wants to hold USD.

People say stuff such as this but then most of the time that same person talks about the value of their bitcoins in US dollars.

Why is that the case? In my opinion it's because US dollars are actually valued by merchants and used to buy things in the real world. They hold real world value.

If the US dollar just failed to exist when you wake up tomorrow morning are you truly confident in many of these same merchants accepting your bitcoin as an alternative?

Prices can be listed in any currency, it doesn't influence the price of said currency. USD is valued by merchants because today a lot of trade happens in USD. Right now we see more and more trade happening in crypto. If this trend continues then at some point people would stop listing prices in USD.

Also I like this site:
http://pricedingold.com

I consider it a huge warning sign when something people are telling me is a good investment can't be bet against. This suggests that they aren't willing to take the other side of the trade, which suggests that it's nowhere near as good a deal as it appears.

LOL.. what? You realize anytime someone takes a long position it's the same thing as betting against a short?

Secondly, you can bet against bitcoin. Go to Kraken and short on leverage. The biggest problem is you are at 3rd party risk and the fees are high.

Lastly, the main reason you haven't been able to bet against bitcoin much is because they haven't made those bull**** derivative markets where they make up fake bitcoin and then sell it. Why the **** does someone want to buy fake coins from a short when they could just buy real coins? Derivative markets for **** like gold and silver make sense because nobody actually wants to take delivery and hold the stuff. Holding bitcoin is easy AF and honestly I see no point for derivative markets in bitcoin.

The derivative markets are coming and I'm interested to see how it plays out. I have a feeling the physical coin market and the derivative market are going to be super out of whack.

I have a feeling some guys are going to try and manipulate the price of BTC down by selling massive amounts of paper on the market, but I just don't see how that will effect BTC exchanges.

Bottom line, say I want to take a long position on these derivative markets, but I can't take delivery of the bitcoin, WHAT THE **** ARE YOU REALLY BETTING ON???????

Gold

Ya me too. I feel like I'm perpetually missing the boat. For all I know it's going to find all kinds of uses and go up another 6000% behind my back, and currencies are going to be measured against bitcoin rather than USD. I mean, what the hell do I know? What do the bears think here?

This sums up my thoughts:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4089579-value-bitcoin

Basically liquidity each day is very limited. And you have a lot of people buying at any price, and not selling until market cap is $2 trillion or something.

So when it comes to liquidity, demand for usage is like a water bottle of money being emptied on the exchanges, while demand from speculators looks like this every day:


So very limited supply of the major coins, and demand that buys at any price. Let's say 2 years from now, negative articles start coming in, and nobody really knows anybody who is using bitcoin, and suddenly that liquidity will go the other way. I think we might see <$50 bitcoin at some point.

On top of that, people are not accounting for holding period of bitcoin. If it is merely used as a transmission mechanism, $5 trillion of transactions each year might only give bitcoin a market cap of $15 billion. So then a high bitcoin price could only be justified if those speculators are not actually selling like 95%+ of coins outstanding, for a long long time.

Of course their technology has more uses, but I know some of their graphics cards were hard get at some point due to demand by bitcoin miners; that's why I posted that. I later looked up how their stocks did, and they went up significantly over the last 20 months or so:



...isn't that also roughly the time frame where large-scale bitcoin became a thing? I bought my current nVidia card in Q1 2015, and I can't remember much talk about graphics cards for BC mining back then. AI/deep learning/data science might have also contributed, but I don't think it's as big as a market right now, while BTC mining is literally printing money.

I mean nVidia won't get bankrupt if BTC should fail, I would not even expect their stocks to go down back to 2014 levels, but I would bet if BTC fails you would see nVidia stocks go down recognizably.

Well, at least their stockmarket performance doesn't seem to reflect that:

Here's a weird thing about cryptographic hashing algorithms


AMD cards are better because they have higher (much higher) raw compute power to execute the algorithms. Incidentally this also causes an increase in demand for Nvidia cards. As people get priced out of amd cards they only have 1 other option left: buy the comparable nvidia card.

Mining has tremendous impact on nvidia cards, just on a secondary level-- as supply restricts for amd cards, people turn to Nvidia cards

Interesting point; I didn't consider AMD, since graphics processors are not their main business (I think). Their stocks also went up in a similar manner in the same time frame.



I guess BTC fail would still hit nvidia harder though, as AMD is more diverse; but who knows.

Thank you dfgg. That was a very helpful post.

don't forget that no one can profitably mine BTC anymore with GPUs. There are special chips now that are basically 100x+ more efficient at hashing sha256.

GPU mining is still a thing for other cryptos (e.g. Ethereum)

I think AMD makes the more potent cards? Could be I have dated intel.

AMD and Nvidia seem not to be making huge amounts on mining which is kinda dumb, but they are not marking up their cards. AMD just released new ones and the retail price is 67% of the street price. Supposedly retail price is near break even for them as well.

Same song and dance about Bitcoin for about 9 years now. Bitcoin will fail. It's a bubble. The government can't let it succeed. Blah blah blah blah. Coming up on 10 years soon.

LOLOLOL

Maybe the irony above was not clear. Nobody is using nVidia or AMD GPUs or Intel CPUs to mine bitcoins in any profitable way. But some do use these processing units to mine other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum.

Its already gone crazy with GBTC.

There is almost a 100% premium to the underlying asset value. If some one wanted to short BTC start there. The fund is irrationally over priced.

How's that short going?