The market is in an amazing bull run, if people want to short the future contract, they gotta own bitcoin first, not a few k, but 50,000 at least to manipulate the market at this point. In addition as I see CME and CBOE only limit 5,000 contract (5,000 BTC) per account, so it is a downside for some1 who wanna short. And the most importantly, the future contract expire in a specific day, so I do not think we need to worry about 10 Dec or 18 Dec, maybe weeks later on expired date.
I guess that's kind of what people are worried about... that the main reason behind this (extended) bull run is the big players loading up on coins meant to be used to push the price down. Didn't know about the specific expiry date, still, that would make a flash-crash only more likely since there'll be a lot of people with a strong interest to push the market down at this specific point in time.
Ya, but if they want to manipulate, they gotta do it on or 1-2 days before the expired date, too risky to push price down on the first day, and see it recover on the expired date. Do you know if CBOE and CME public the contract information? Like how much volume, how many contracts short, how many contracts long?