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.
Boomerlu you are continuing the icbit tactic of "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit".
You know very well that the contracts on icbit are almost completely disconnected from the bitcoin market. icbit prices are most often the result of a position reacting to a trader who is not aware of what goes on, squeezing the trader and extracting the contracts cheaply. That was done to me several times, with contracts being put down against the movement of spot and apparently with knowledge of my account particulars that only icbit staff would have.
The nonsense about backwardation etc is getting old. You know it very well but I'll spell it out for anyone who might be deceived by you. The price of a contract at icbit moves for a short time with contracts bought by someone landing on the site. Once that person has some bitcoin vested all of the major price moves are artificial pushes deliberately meant to squeeze the client, force margin. There is nothing to do with backwardation, contango or anything else. Those words are used to con people plain and simple.
As far as "nowhere does volatility enter as a factor", that's silly. I've covered this in another post, you cannot have leverage that ignores volatility in valuation. It is the first signature of a scam.
You can use all the big words you want, maybe you will impress someone. I know bullshit when I hear it.