Quote: (12-05-2017 10:39 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:
Exaggerating for effect, but this should give you the general idea:
I'm goldman sachs.
I take out a short for BTC for a trillion dollars. A short means I sell it now and buy it later, as opposed to a normal purchase where I buy now and sell it later. So with a short, I make money if the price goes DOWN, not up.
I call up my buddies at the federal gov't and have coinbase, bittrex, and kraken shut down and their execs all arrested for violating securities laws.
The price of BTC goes down a lot due to panic. It goes from 10k to 1k.
I close my short.
I pocket 900 billion dollars.
While I'm sure that there will be a big short of BTC at some point, I'm not in agreement that it's nearly as easy as saying "shut it down."
Bitcoin will be bought and sold and big banks will go both long and short on it just like they do with any other security in existence.
The Maximally Pathetic Schema: Xs who labor to convince Ys that “I’m not one of those despicable Zs!,” when in fact it is obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Ys see no difference between Xs and Zs, don’t care anyway, and would love to throw both Xs and Zs into a gulag.
- Adrian Vermeule