Ripple seeks to address a MAJOR banking issue in the current day global financial sector: liquidity management.

The tokens themselves are also valuable. While the company has stated its goal is not to be an alternative currency, using XRP as bridge is highly advantageous, particularly with crypto pairs that are not traded heavily or to incentivize the trading between others currently not practiced.

Ah man, my sentiments exactly. Everyone complaining left and right about scams, bubbles, blah, blah, blah. If anything, being in this for many years has taught me that most people read/develop all their opinions from FORBES, MSNBC, FOX and many other garbage sites. This is literally the largest wealth distribution change possibility in history, yet most commoners say it’s too scary... It’s literally a rich person handing he poor the reigns one time while they go take a shit.

The fallacy is believing that libertarian/anarchist philosophy is what invented/drove the birth of this in the first place. The BTC white paper has citations that date back to the early 80s. The problem of centralized key distribution was known almost 40 years ago, but the advantage public key systems like BTC/ripple, etc was only realized recently because of gains in efficiency.

The commoners are focused on earning a few bucks flipping tokens back and forth (which I wholly support while we all can). The deeper meaning here is that using a public security protocol will essentially eliminate the need for clearinghouses (the middle man). This will allow companies that conduct transactions to save fuck loads of money. Think of it like the current state of the USA. We privatize gains and socialize losses. Banks will save billions and their users will be charged the same fees (or higher) for wires, bank transfers, ATM deposits, bank late fees... but what will be advertised is the “ease of electronic payment,” “quick transactions,” “free international money transmission.”

It’s all about the elimination of the middle man. Socializing the cost of doing business while privately profiting from conducting it. As people no longer go to brick and mortar anything (especially banks), all will be done on your phone and computers nearly completely one day.

I always go back and forth with the utility of BTC itself and what ‘value’ that would bring. If large-scale common commodities were easily purchased with BTC, why would people do that versus using their own native country’s currency? What would be the incentive for the common person? Over the years, whenever we fell into a bear market, the sentiment is always the same... people get bored with the stagnant price and many slowly exit until the next boom cycle. I wonder if this crypto experiment may have other expected outcomes outside of the current understanding and expectations.

I never pay attention to the titles. They mean shit. I just opened an account a while ago so I could start adding to the conversations, but I have been in BTC since back in the faucet days.

Each boom cycle creates another generation of new bag holders until the next boom. By the time the next boom hits, those holders are so eager to sell from the last boom that they fail to see the accumulation potential. They then sell into the latest boom, get FOMO, purchase again “on the dip” and then become the next cycle’s bag holders. If only people would realize that chasing short term gains always gets you burned.

I see this as well. Specifically with regards to the blockchain. Each bank (and its customer base) would conduct all transactions in said bank’s ‘coin.’ These transactions would be privately validated through said bank and then logged to the public blockchain. As transaction occur between banks (and their customers), this process would be repeated. More transactions = higher fees = more money made by the bank from customers and from other banks it does business with. This would theoretically increase the ‘coin’ price of the bank with the highest volumes as compared to other banks. Of course all of this could be speculated on in a futures market or an actual regulated “coin” market much like present day stocks. Banks get around the problem of centralized trust (as they privately assume some risk by validating their own transactions offline with their ‘coin’ or in-house network) and publicly confirm those private transactions through the public blockchain ledger.

Overall: volatility is a good thing. High volume futures speculation in turn may influence exchange rate pricing and vice versa. IMO, there needs to be fluctuations in price to incentivize its widespread uptake and eventual use as a placeholder of tangible good and services value. When we get to the placeholder stage, volatility will be gone, but value will be installed.

My post is predicated under the assumption that the volume of futures trading will be larger than the volume of BTC exchange trading someday in the future. This assumption makes it slightly more likely that a futures market has the ability to influence exchange rates due to margin.

Two examples: 1) trading in a futures market and 2) trading on an exchange

Ex 1. If a futures contract begins to go negative, the contract holder must either decide to 1) close out at a loss or 2) add more cash to the account in order to satisfy margin account requirements. With this is mind, all futures holders would have to decide which option to choose. This decision could create the possibility of momentum if the exchange rate were to change.

Ex. 2 When trading on an exchange, the holder doesn’t have to make these types of decisions at one time. Rather, a holder can decide when to buy or when to sell their position.

From a futures market standpoint, a lot of trading involves stop loss and TA strategies. This also happens to some extent in exchange trading. This creates a large pool of participants in both markets that behave in accordance to expectations of how “others” in the market are (and newcomers will also) behave. With the large plethora of TA information bought and sold between companies, this creates the expectation of price movement. The results of this are often additional futures purchasing and exchange rate fluctuations that either precede or follow actual decisioning made by participants.

From an exchange standpoint, the interaction with futures markets enable arbitrage opportunities. Since participants in these markets do not behave in a solo manner (only futures or only exchanges), this creates opportunity to buy on one platform and sell through the other. The net of this behavior keeps futures markets and exchanges tied together closely.

At least with respect to present day currency futures and exchanges, there is a general relationship between volume of futures trading and exchange prices. This doesn’t suggest causation, but it does suggest a strong correlation. Another way put, if BTC prices on the exchange are highly volatile, we might see a huge increase in futures trading because of the speculation interest. More futures trading, more price volatility on the exchanges.

In conclusion:
1) Futures markets and exchange market participants have different decisioning that influences market behavior and price
2) Futures markets may significantly alter BTC exchange rates for as long as futures trading volume is higher than exchange trading volume.
3) Over time, the futures markets and BTC exchanges will become more intertwined resulting in less volatility between the platforms

Final comment: Once the futures markets open, price volatility will stay rather consistent and will correlate positively with good news and upbeat market sentiment. As these interactions between futures markets and exchanges mature (also as BTC availability decreases), volatility will decrease.

If you read back into the Wall Observer you will find what I am talking about (as an example). Every run up is essentially the same. While the price may differ and the ecosystem may be becoming more mature with each new price bubble, human nature has not changed.

While diverse, most Bitcoiners can be separated in into a few common categories: HODlers, Mooners, Permabears, miss the boat FOMO types, etc. Each time the price explodes you get waves of people who believe this is the big one that will be all end all, the ones who believe that it will never touch the basement levels again, those that think it “can’t go that high,” those that believe it's a speculative bubble driven by (insert random Chinese exchange, some new law, massive adoption, institutional money, etc) and then there are the few and mostly silent that understand basic human instincts drive and are influenced by what is going on.

I’m not sure where some individuals 'learned’ the belief that the financial sector can growth exponentially indefinitely... Understanding humans are heavily influenced by sentiment allows you to understand the predictions being made by some people in these forums. Bullish/Bearish, these things only matter with regards to sentiment. Instincts dictate behavior while sentiments influence instinctive behavior.

That’s what I fear. So many are getting in now with the expectation in won’t stop. Just like the last two bubbles, many people are going to lose their shirt.

Ah man, this current run up reminds me so much of the $1000 USD bubble a few years ago. Comments on this board are identical... Sentiments are identical... It remains to be seen what futures will do to the BTC price, but regardless, we all know what goes up must come down. I personally think futures will be deleterious on the BTC community for awhile. My thoughts from the beginning have always been that BTC technology was invented as a solution to our current financial trajectory. It’s somewhat disappointing to see our current financial instruments assimilating into BTC ad hoc. It gives a bad taste, as all the problems that come with fractional reserve banking and some speculative financial instruments will just parasitize BTC.

None-the-less, if BTC is ever going to truly succeed, this is going to happen to some degree. The exchanges are the ones who will truly benefit initially from the futures trading. After all, their BTC price quotes/infrastructure are the ones directly being traded on. The deals made to allow futures trading to even exist here must have been something to behold. It’s for a reason. The gov’t regulates exchanges which in turn moderates futures. Very much a top down strategy. The bottleneck is exchanges and currently that is where most people go. Once futures opens, there will be mass influx in futures shifting the bottleneck to futures and I predict a lag in exchange trading. This will slow the price, influence the type of futures sold (mostly shorts) and the exponential rise in price we have now will fall out and reset itself for another run up in the future.

I’ve personally seen this over the last two bubbles. This forum is caked with old posts about it rising infinitely; technology investment is increasing, adoption rates have never been higher, etc. Even more so, I feel like I bang my head on the wall these days telling people this is what happens and if you remove your head from the BTC>fiat>gov’t cloud, most players can do a decent job of predicting this and positioning themselves on either side of the run up/run down quite well.

Not looking to convince anyone. My opinion is rooted in standard BETI analysis. I’ll send you a PM in late Feb early Mar.

You can see one of my previous posts on this. Essentially, hedge funds need a way into BTC and the current price doesn’t facilitate that. The futures market will open and these guys will take out a massive short position on the expontential BTC price right now. When this run up breaks down, the hedge funds will make huge cash profits on the decline. Come Feb/Mar 2018, the price will stabilize at its price bottom (my est is around $6-8k) and the hedges will either buy BTC off the exchanges behind the scenes or take out a new long position and wait for the next big run up in a few years.

Unfortunately, the technology will be slowly commandeered from here on out by big banks, regulators and the gov’t. You can’t get the perks of “the machine” without being a cog in it. BTC will be parasitized by the ruling elite eventually and employed for largely their gain while giving the commoners crumbs (as always).

It’s best to stay up on the trends, open a futures trading account, accumulate as many coins as you can afford and get ready to offload the bulk of your coins in the coming years for your country’s cash equivalency when we hit the high highs ($100K plus). Dump that back into futures and repeat. Once the ETFs are born, say goodbye to the huge price swings. By then, BTC will be just a imaginary thing (like all the gold in the Fed reserve...), however; the technology will be the king.

Futures is how big banks and the gov’t are going to get a hold of BTC from a regulatory standpoint. Since it is not actually feasible at this point to put restrictions on the actual coins themselves, the trading of them, etc.

Step 1: Buy lots of BTC on the open market with mega cash to push price up exponentially in a short time

Step 2: Open futures market and take out a massive short position

Step 3: Once futures market is open, dump large position into the price run up

Step 4: Sell short position for huge cash surplus

Step 5: Purchase BTC on the market for reduced rate

Step 6: Rise and repeat

Through doing this, large banks, investment firms, etc. will be able to accumulate the necessary BTC position over the coming years necessary to corner the market. Subsequently, these entities are also subject to gov’t regulations. This is how the gov’t gets a foot hold as well. As the price increases to very high levels over the coming years, the cost to miners will be astronomical and the transaction fees will be too much to handle. They will need a way to keep these manageable. Futures will offer protection to miners and will allow the common person to get involved as BTC will become more and more scarce.

My thoughts are that we could see up to $35-40K USD on this rally over the next few weeks. We are just starting to hit exponential growth now. Historically, following a few days->weeks in exponential, we can expect a rapid increase (super exponential state) followed by a healthy pull back and perhaps a double top prior to a sell off.

Citing BETI analyses, my guess is that following the true top, we can expect a bottom to be found ~1-3 months from then and a return to the steady state mean somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5-8K USD.

I see something like this in the future:

Large BTC exchanges could become the new crypto hedge funds of the future and current hedgies are not too happy about it... IMHO, this is likely to occur in some fashion as most large scale investors/firms may have missed the “early boat” into cryptos and need a way to accumulate at a reduced price without greatly influencing the price too much. I see the likes of big banks becoming preferred early investors in the futures arena as a way to get a foothold into cryptoland. Once they have accumulated sufficient coins (read contracts), they will begin to parrot how important crypto is to your portfolio and why it is a good investment. Retail mom’s and pop’s will now jump in and it will be as if it was JP Morgan’s idea all along.

In the distant future, actual possession of the coin will not mean shit. This is how gov’t will take hold of BTC and regulate. There will be a day when all the coins are mined/bought and trading them around will not be practical as is today. The infrastructure will be surrounding the coin. It will be an intangible placeholder for an intangible placeholder tied to something tangible and governable (fiat).

BETI analysis suggests this rally’s upper limit should fall somewhere between $12K USD and $40K USD prior to a pull back around $6-6.5K USD within the next 3 months.