akwfleaspirit, you are incredibly misinformed about futures.

In an efficient market, cash and carry arbitrage will force the futures price to equal the discounted (using a risk free interest rate) spot price net of carrying costs (btw, Fireball explicitly posted how to execute this strategy). NOWHERE does volatility enter as a parameter to valuation (that only happens in nonlinear instruments like options). Trust me, I'm a quant.

There IS the embedded "default option" ie, walking away from a bad position, when leverage is involved. This was a problem before, as admin waited too long to margin call/liquidate a trader, thus their position ended up being negative and counterparties were liquidate away from market.

However, the "life" of this default option is only the amount of time between margin call and actual liquidation of a position. This used to be (I'm guessing) 24-48 hours, now it's only 1 hour, and so it's much less valuable now.

Also, this default option would not necessarily cause a premium, as a short can default just as a long can.

Finally, since shorting spot bitcoins is difficult, it is much harder to bring a backwardated futures market back in line with spot (to do so you would have to long futures and short spot). It's much "easier" to bring contango down.

Now, it IS true that manipulation happens and that it's bad practice to use the Last Sale as the clearing price. It's unfortunate and quite frankly strange that the contract clearing price hasn't been changed to some type of average. However, I will say that I have never lost money on manipulation on ICBIT.