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Comment by Rmilb | Hacker News Reader

If you are certain it will collapse you can make a lot of money shorting it. If you are 100% sure, there is no downside.

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Maybe you've heard the old finance saying: "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Generally the problem with shorting is that the shorts are time limited - because it is a derivative bet, not a proper loan.

And following Keynes the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

What financial mechanisms exist to short Bitcoin?

Here's an idea. Ethereum smart contracts to short bitcoin. You borrow my BTC for 30 days, with a 5% fee. Someone could make a killing off of that idea.

https://medium.com/dydxderivatives/introducing-dydx-2d0f0f32...

Note: I'm not affiliated with that project, but I did see them present yesterday at Token Summit and it looked very interesting!

This is more of a general purpose app, but would work.

https://gofreakingdoit.com/

Possibly at bitmex: https://www.bitmex.com/

CBOE and CME to offer the next couple weeks.

I used to short/long bitcoin/eth on GDAX, you have to register as a business and turn on Margin Trading

CME Bitcoin futures

Is there even a US based legit platform to short Bitcoin? If Coinbase was serious about having a true market they would allow you to short Bitcoin as well as buy.

Coinbase does have a market tho, it's called GDAX, you use your coinbase login and it has margin trading on it. Once I found out about GDAX I never used coinbase again for trading currencies because GDAX has no transaction fees if you are creating the transaction ie. setting up the buy/sell limits

CME is offering bitcoin futures starting next week.

Interestingly enough, S. Korea has declared bitcoin futures illegal today and S. Korea is the leading buyer of BTC.

Should be a good time.

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