This decreases my level of interest about the CME Bitcoin futures:pic.twitter.com/L5oI6JS7zB
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If this is a little unclear: the structure of these contracts is that, conceptually, there are two people: one promises to pay the other $FOO Bitcoins in USD in a year. That person is now short Bitcoin. The other is willing to pay for the Bitcoin; they're long.
Why pay the BTC in USD? Because this a) this is a cash settled futures contract and b) it is cash settled because there exists substantial complexity to actually paying someone in BTC in status quo and future stats of world. (Yay, payment network of future.)
So every day the CME marks these positions to market, saying "OK, those BTC that you're short are worth a total of $100 more than yesterday; settle up by paying your counterparty $100 today." (The actual money movement is more complicated.)
And the contracts are settled daily in this fashion, until one final cash settlement. Now here's the rub:
In the event BTC goes to nothing, the true settlement the short party should get is the entire cash value of the contract. "Well OK it looks like the 10 BTC you owe him are worth zero and we last assigned them a notional value of $75k, OK, fair's fair, here's your $75k."
But what the CME is saying is "Look look look we know the value isn't actually zero even if the spot price is, well, technically speaking, a very zero looking sort of number if you squint at it. So we'll say the true price is e.g. $2.5k a piece and close the contracts."
"Wait a minute... so I get $50k, not $75k." "Yep good math." "And who gets the $25k?" "Your counterparty." "WHY?" "Well we didn't want to wipe them out." "YOU WIPE PEOPLE OUT EVERY DAY. THAT IS A MAJOR PART OF YOUR JOB. THE ORDERLY WIPING OUT OF PEOPLE."
(It is! Most people involved in the futures market are using margin, to avoid tying up the amount of money notionally involved in future contracts. A sharp price movement in either direction generally wipes out some participants. Totally normal.)
e.g. I had at one point said "I'm going to deliver 1.25 million yen in a year in return for your $125k. Here's ~$6k of earnest money." A ~5% chance upwards in the price of yen makes my earnest money go away and the contract close out.
12.5 million. Sorry, always get yen numbers mixed up. The reason to enter into this transaction for me wasn't speculation: I've got a modestly complicated international financial situation with income in JPY and expenses in USD, and I didn't want exchange risk.
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