An overlooked point: this will be a cash settled market (
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-31/cme-launch-bitcoin-futures-q4). No bitcoin will actually change hands. If you want actual bitcoin, you have to cash out of your futures contract and buy bitcoin just as you otherwise would. If you want to short bitcoin, you don't actually have to borrow a bitcoin, you just have to put up the required cash margin. Or so I read it. I think on most other futures markets you at least have the option to settle in the commodity traded, e.g. you can demand real gold or real pork bellies on those markets, though hardly anyone does.
This will have consequences, but I'm not smart enough to know what they will be. It creates an exclusively paper bitcoin market that will operate in parallel with the real bitcoin market, but the prices on the paper market will be set according to the "CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR)" which is supposed to be an agglomeration of rates from various "constituent exchanges" which are Bitstamp, GDAX, itBit and Kraken - all trading in real bitcoin.
In a "real" futures market, if you shorted bitcoin you would have to borrow bitcoin and sell it, expecting to buy it back at a lower price, and this would push the price down. But in the CME version, no bitcoin would actually be sold on the real exchanges, so the downward pressure on the price would not be direct - and the effect on the CME prices would not be direct either, since the CME prices are fixed by the "real" prices.
My head hurts. This is as far as I can go.