Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Down, down, down, down, down
by
deisik
on 06/03/2014, 08:46:02 UTC
Another great thing about bitcoin, making it easier to predict the future is that it cannot be sold naked short (yet?). Any commodity can be sold short because traders cannot easily take delivery. Bitcoin doesn't suffer from this issue, which makes it about the only true free market left in the world economy. True free market is very hard to manipulate, because you can only sell as many items of asset as you actually own, you cannot sell what you don't own. In any other commodity you can sell what you don't own, and if you have a lot of cash (blns), you can easily manipulate the market by trading on leverage. In bitcoin you'd first have to buy those bitcoins and possess them to be able to sell them. In other words, these actions are trackable through price charts and future price action can be predicted more or less. Enjoy the only true free market of crypto currencies on the planet while it lasts, it may not be forever.

I can't agree with that. Money as such doesn't make you the owner of anything (save for the money itself). I don't think bitcoin is any different in this aspect. I think you are unintentionally confusing bitcoin as money and bitcoin as a commodity here. If the latter, I don't see how you can't fix its price now for future delivery just like you do with a foreign currency (which can be easily shorted though it obviously doesn't have the delivery problem)...