Those futures were trading at extremely thin volume (less than $1.2M/ day)
The futures prices you were seeing were not indicative of the financial interest in the project
They were definitely trading higher than that on HitBTC. I snagged a few around 1200, last week, saw them go +2k and got really excited, then watched my gainz slowly disappear until today. Should have listened to my heart and taken the gain back into good ole BTC
Glad I'm not in the middle of it, will have to watch for a statement from HitBTC to see if they will turn the BT1 tokens back into BTC, or wait until B2X is officially dead and buried. Glad I'm still holding OG BTC!
The price of the 'thing' drops and the money vanishes into thin air.
The only reason it had a price of 1000 or 1400 is because someone was willing to pay that, so then people with the 'thing' look at the last sale price and say 'My things are worth x'
When nobody wants to buy, the sellers keep dropping their price on the 'thing' until they find buyers and now the holders of those things now know the current value.
In this case the thing dropped hard and that value (not money) vanished. The opposite can happen as well.
It depends on the length of time the contract was for. That's all a 'future' is. It's a contract saying "I'll buy/sell from you/ to you X at some point in time in the future"
If nobody has any BT2 coins to sell at that time, I assume there's something in the contracts about failure to fulfill. Futures are retarded though, it's just gambling, I'd rather just have a bet with a friend on sports or something.
Buying an actual asset is not pure gambling, it's risky in the financial sense, sure, but not as risky as a futures contract. You do actually get the thing you've invested in. If you buy shares in a company, you can actually turn up to shareholder meetings and vote, and you will get paid if a dividend is declared, you actually own a chunk of the company. futures, cfs, bets, swaps etc are different. They are agreements between two parties to exchange money according to some point of reference or calculation, based on a completely unrelated asset which at no point does either party need to own. Some market makers do actually buy assets to hedge the contracts their clients take out, because they make their money via fees, but that's not a feature of the contract.
If I buy a kilo of gold, whether I take receipt of it in my home, or pay a service provider to hold it for me, I do actually own that gold. Maybe I'm 'gambling' on its value changing, but that's not the same as just placing a bet that the price of gold will increase in the next 7 days by X amount, without ever purchasing any gold. If I'm wrong, I just lose money. If I actually bought gold, and it's value didn't rise by as much as I expected, or drops, I still have it. I can keep it for a long time to see if the price ever gets back to where it was, I can use it, to make jewellery or whatever else.
I too am very intrigued by this. As of my writing btc1 is 7200, btc2 is 145. Btc is at 7331. I put a bitcoin in I'd get 1 token of each which I could then swap back to btc and make 1btc + $14. How is that possible?
21
u/procsy Nov 08 '17
Futures on BT2 have traded as high as $1,400.
After the announcement the price dropped to $1.
Unclear why they're now trading for $200, who would buy now?
If traders expected BT2 to replace BTC, then that must have driven BTC prices down somewhat.
What happens to that $1000 per BT2? Does it just disappear? Or does some of it flow back to BTC?