Yes, but there is also the option to take delivery in futures like gold, silver, oil. It's fine if people want to settle in cash, but if you take away the option for delivery it's a totally different ballgame. It's impossible to arb and keep things in check with the true price of the physical item.

Why would anyone pay more for the future than spot? Why would anyone sell for less? They know their position is going to be closed out at the spot price on a nearby date, so they could just take the position in the spot market if the futures are too out of line.

I'm not sure what you're not seeing. You know there are bids and offers in the futures market, right? And if you want to buy you have to take the offer or wait on the bid and maybe not get any. You won't be able to buy significantly below spot because no one is going to offer there, nor hit your bid there, knowing that the spot price is where it's going to settle.

Worst case the bid and offer are so wide, and below and above spot respectively, so that no one will want to trade it.

(I know there is a small carrying cost on futures depending on interest rates and time to expiration, which makes futures fair value slightly different from the spot, but it doesn't matter for the sake of this argument)

Specifically the US and/or Chinese, or could another do it as well?

In theory anybody with enough money and will could TRY. Culturally the US is more likely. China “bans” things but dont go proactively destroying. Just see what they have done so far. Then again the US at least likes the narrative of open innovation so it’s a tough sell. Also hard to keep things secret at an operation of this scale for a 3 letter agency. And it gets more expensive every day without success being ensured. I call FUD but agree it’s “possible”.

Just thought I would check out 2+2 after many years... Unfortunately I did not get into Bitcoin in 2011 when I first read about it on this forum, was just busy with life until mid this year when I first heard Doug Polk mention something about Etherium on his YT and I was just blown away as soon as I took a seriously looked into all this stuff. I firmly believe this will change the world far more than the internet, I believe this is on the level of the industrial revolution and the discovery of electricity, and I'm not the type to ever get too excited about much generally. The effects of a trusted, decentralized, deflationary store of wealth and the incentives it will have in promoting better behaviors (saving/low time preference) will be absolutely massive for humanity long term. This is before even going into the smart contract,DAOs, etc which without going into specifics is going to put massive amounts of middlemen and other nonsense jobs like HR, office admins, etc out of jobs. There basically will quickly need to be some sort of UBI, but that was coming anyway, but basically it'll be much better for you as an individual if you start investing as much as you can into this stuff (preferably on the dips )

Oh and if you hear anyone still comparing this stuff to 'tulip bulbs', they are just clowns.

Futures should trade at a smallish discount to spot, maybe 10-25% annualized discount. If there is legitimate interest in shorting BTC, short sellers will be selling longer dated futures. Long term holders of bitcoin, can synthetically lend by selling their BTC and buying futures.

The difference between spot BTC price and 6 month futures, will be the cost of shorting or the yield of lending.

why the big markups on localbitcoins(when buying)?

partly because you dont have to sign up to an exchange, identify yourself, wait for transfers to/from bank.

People are willing to pay a premium to launder dirty money.

Basically all of the above.

Small criminals (although online criminals might wanna sell at a discount ;D ), hookers, lazy users, newbies wanting to meet BTC people.

In some countries there are no good online exchanges.

What's to stop Zuckerberg from using his own crypto as the basis for a UBI scheme? Which FB or IG user is going to turn down free $?

Correct because tulip bulbs actually grow tulips which look and smell nice.

what do u guys think about the TETHER scam ?
how long will they keep going ?
i think bitfinex and binance shut down in mid ~feburary and we see a lot of people with empty portfolios.

if u dont know about the TETHER scam, check this guy out
https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Legitimacy and Future of Crypto:

Short term investment wise: Everything is highly undervalued still given hype, momentum, human psychology and the fact that there's plenty of countries lined up that have not joined the boom yet.

Mid and long term: Almost everything is extremely overvalued including Ethereum and will crash to close to 0 compared to today's evaluations. Bitcoin has a chance and a few projects as well that aren't utility tokens or alternative currencies. Everything else WILL crash.