Ah man, this current run up reminds me so much of the $1000 USD bubble a few years ago. Comments on this board are identical... Sentiments are identical... It remains to be seen what futures will do to the BTC price, but regardless, we all know what goes up must come down. I personally think futures will be deleterious on the BTC community for awhile. My thoughts from the beginning have always been that BTC technology was invented as a solution to our current financial trajectory. It’s somewhat disappointing to see our current financial instruments assimilating into BTC ad hoc. It gives a bad taste, as all the problems that come with fractional reserve banking and some speculative financial instruments will just parasitize BTC.

None-the-less, if BTC is ever going to truly succeed, this is going to happen to some degree. The exchanges are the ones who will truly benefit initially from the futures trading. After all, their BTC price quotes/infrastructure are the ones directly being traded on. The deals made to allow futures trading to even exist here must have been something to behold. It’s for a reason. The gov’t regulates exchanges which in turn moderates futures. Very much a top down strategy. The bottleneck is exchanges and currently that is where most people go. Once futures opens, there will be mass influx in futures shifting the bottleneck to futures and I predict a lag in exchange trading. This will slow the price, influence the type of futures sold (mostly shorts) and the exponential rise in price we have now will fall out and reset itself for another run up in the future.