Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC)

[TREND1]

Unlike the stock market, futures markets are a zero-sum game. For every long there is a short. For every winner, there’s a loser. Every dollar of one trader’s profit is a dollar lost by another trader. If someone wants to bet big that bitcoin is going down — say, by shorting 1,000 bitcoin contracts — there needs to be one or more traders willing to take the opposite side. That liquidity may not be there from Day One. As the futures market grows, large institutional money will increasingly influence the price of bitcoin. If bitcoin derivatives become larger than the underlying cash market for bitcoin, Wall Street’s opinion will have an outsized effect on bitcoin prices. That might be bullish or bearish.