Whenever a pink sheet stock hits the skids after appreciating several thousand percent, the chat forum on Ihub focuses on short sellers. The debate, if one could call it that, gets to a point that short selling is somehow inherently evil and should be outlawed.
During the dotcom mania era from late 1998 to early 2000 all those NASDAQ stocks that appreciated several thousand percent began declining. Again, there were the complaints about short sellers.
After the dotcom bubble burst Wall Street came up with a new angle to entice speculators: the mortgage backed bond. If you read Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" it's a story about four guys who took the other side of the trade and made huge profits off of what was a financial bubble.
Maybe Wall Street's lack of participation in bitcoin promotion is the fact it didn't create it the same way it created dotcom, telecom and biotech IPOs with foundations made of sand. As long as a people would buy just about anything with the word dot.com in its corporate name it didn't matter. Wall Street merely attempted to satisfy public demand for anything new -- and cheap at the onset -- that would appreciate several thousand percent.
The proponents of bitcoin, as I perceive it, make a simple argument which says, "this time, it's different." Seasoned professionals like Warren Buffett (we also use him as the example) will tell you whenever you hear that statement, turn around, walk the other way while thinking about sell short.
So now the financial markets have created a mechanism for speculators to benefit from a decline in the market value of bitcoin. This is only fair. Others, of course, would argue for the contrary view.
The Nasdaq's third tier, the AMEX can be just as bad, and last but not least, the OTC, it seems, are financial venues that reward failure.
