Bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets, in general, have been bearish during the first month of 2018 after many digital assets reached all-time price highs this past December. A lot of people have been following the correlation between the newly added bitcoin-based derivatives markets offered by Cboe and CME, alongside bitcoin spot prices over the past four weeks. Over the last few weeks, most of the bitcoin futures contracts have been bearish as traders forecasting the recent downtrend in value ‘shorted’ the market. However, according to recent data, bitcoin-futures bets are showing that a great majority of the contracts are betting ‘long’ on bitcoin’s price — predicting that BTC’s value will be rising shortly.
I'm curious while people are so obsessed with these futures nowadays? If you buy a contract, you won't receive bitcoins at the end of its life-cycle, end of story. If Bitcoin tanks your account will most likely get destroyed due to margin call. If you could receive real coins, you wouldn't care much since you would have them in your own pocket, and you could wait patiently till the price reverts. But with futures your money will be taken from you. So what's the point?
I agree with what you said, but I think people would say two of the points are:
1. You can hedge with futures and not need to understand bitcoin security. Or miners might want to be able to sell known supply at a particular point and the be able to cover it later.
2. I think this is the more important one though: it gives access to bitcoin in regulated financial markets. In and of itself that is not important but the expectation is that it will help address the concerns the SEC had when they denied the bitcoin ETFs last year. If that is accurate and the SEC doesn’t keep moving the goalposts, it bodes well for bitcoin ETF approvals in the future.
