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Comment by softdev12 | Hacker News Reader

Summary of this article:

1) Barry Silbert's BIT has beat the Winklevoss' (or Winklevii) bitcoin fund to market by using a backdoor listing technique.

2) Finra granted its request for a permanent ticker symbol, GBTC, and that “is expected to be effective shortly.”

3) Each share of BIT is worth approximately one-tenth of a bitcoin. As of Friday, the trust’s net asset value stood at $24.43 per share.

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Oh goody, I can short bitcoin now.

Not sure if you're serious, but at what price would you stop shorting? What strategy would you use? Short with a trailing stop?

Shorting and options will probably help to stabilize price volatility (I'm neutral on bitcoin).

As a bonus you get the considerable chance that they will lose all their bitcoins in a hack/fraud for free.

Hmmm... going long bitcoin and shorting this may be the trade to do.

That's what the fund's issuers are doing, too.

Before thinking this is a free trade, consider that it costs money to short a stock. In order to short the stock, you need to first borrow it from someone so that you could sell it to someone else. When borrowing a stock, you have to pay an interest rate for the shares which were loaned to you.

Some stocks are cheap to short while others could have high double digit interest rates. The rate depends on the willingness of people to lend and volatility.

Check out http://btc.sx/

You can already do it at BitFinex with 3:1 leverage.

Now all the people who say they wish they could short bitcoin will need another excuse for why they don't short bitcoin.

You already can on a few places. OKCoin seems to be most popular, and up to 20X leverage on their futures, http://okcoin.com/

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