What losses do you refer to?
You just won't be able to ride the price spike should there be any, but other than that, I would in no case count it as "losses". At max, these would be unearned or lost profits (or rather lost profit opportunities), but given the uncertainty, price volatility, and the current Bitcoin price itself, that might not be a very bad idea after all. Anyway, we are already well below the recent highs, so it may be too late to short unless we are going to drop a lot lower, of course (say, a few thousand dollars)
OK, I was reading too much into your use of the word hedge. What you suggest looks to be a good way of receiving the fork coin and still having your BTC available to trade short if you need to. I was thinking that what you meant by a hedge was that your PnL column would be neutral whatever happens to the BTC price. I was just pointing out that if the price goes up then you will get those losses
Well, it seems that I mean exactly that
You borrow (i.e. short Bitcoin) and lend out (i.e. sort of go long) the same amount of bitcoins (let's discard the differences in the funding rates for the moment), so this is exactly what you will see, i.e. PnL being close to neutral. Indeed, if the price surges you won't be able to reap profits but, personally, I can't call that losses simply because you won't suffer any real losses if the price crashes or just seriously corrects instead. This is what hedging means. I understand that when taken in isolation, this approach doesn't make a lot of sense (since you could just sell the coins for fiat and get done with that), but there are still many use cases when it does. One such use case I just mentioned, i.e. receiving B2X tokens in a safe way
FWIW I'm looking at anything down to $6,000 as a buying opportunity if it breaks below that then a major correction may be in play ~$4,000 ish
There might be a dramatic squeeze when Bitcoin futures are allowed since it doesn't take a lot to bring Bitcoin down Soros style (even if temporarily)