bitcoiners in 2012: "Bitcoin will eliminate the wall street banksters!"
Bitcoiners right now: "OMG Goldman is getting in, who's ready for their moon rocket?"
Not necessarily my POV that it'll happen, I'm just arguing that those two views aren't contradictory. (Even if they were, it is not unusual for a community of humans to hold diverse, and even incompatible, views.)
0) https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-futures-make-way-new-kind-w...
I think you are saying "futures reduce volatility for the trader" but I'm not sure.
However one needs some pretty steel-made cojones to short a bubble....
With futures, however, you can put together positions that will provide a known limit on your downside for short positions. This provides a more appealing avenue for shorts to get in with much less risk.
With respect to the latter, my own personal theory for why this is is that more liquidity means more individuals actively trading the asset, and that translates to more non-correlating factors affecting the price. This makes it less likely that a shock somewhere in the economy will have a significant impact on the price.
Modern economic scholarship properly offers a better explanation.