Quote from: deisik on March 08, 2014, 09:04:56 AM

If you take time to find out why people buy futures in the first place at all (and this is not for speculation, to begin with), this question will be a trifle for you. People buy currency futures since they don't need currency right now, but in the future (when they actually need it), the price may change disadvantageously... I guess you just don't know that the futures price is not the same as the price it allows (gives a right) to sell or buy the underlying currency (commodity) at... Grin

I know what hedging is. I also know that there is a) nothing to hedge in bitcoin compared to forex exchange risks, b) no bailout of bitcoin exchanges makes any future disadvantageous price fluctuation not such a big risk compared to the case when bitcoin exchanges goes under, which is not so rare.

In practise it means that nobody in their right mind will buy a bitcoin futures contract with one exception:

Quote from: devphp

Do you mean bitcoin miners would sell their future bitcoin production? That'd be interesting, but that requires much heavier levels of regulation than now, having them registered as companies, etc. In that case, yeah, futures contracts might have a chance.

and even this wouldn't be practical or popular as miners would have to offer a very attractive discount to entice someone to risk losing money due to the exchange bankruptcy.