Short selling requires someone to lend you bitcoins to sell. 

An exchange might allow it  -- i.e. accept your order and execute it, but Bitcoins would actually have to be delivered by someone -- possibly the exchange.

There's nothing special about hedge-funds shorting stuff, except that they like to do it , and have deep enough risk pockets to do it in reasonable size. 

Any decent sized hedge-fund has a pretty strict set of assets that can be traded.  I'm not aware of any big funds that have bitcoin on those lists -- but if the funds and trusts arrive as promised, many hedge-funds will be able to trade them simply as they are listed-shares.

It would be very beneficial to have someone lending bitcoins to allow shorting  -- it brings stability and liquidity to a market.


The only real problem is that there are not enough coins to go around at current prices -- but this was always true.