Imagine how sweet life would be if you had shorted cybercurrency a month ago.
Shorting cybercurrency is an extremely odd concept.
A short sale is a contract in which an investor sells a security that the investor does not own. In theory short sellers are supposed to buy the security at some point in the future.
Of course, one of the really cool things about short selling is that, if the shorted security goes bankrupt, there is no need to buy it back. It appears that, if this happens, and one has a good accountant, one could sneak buy without paying capital gains tax on the short.
Cybercurrency is not a physical entity. It is a concept. The currency is a formula executed in cyberspace.
An investor who shorts a cybercurrency is selling something that doesn't physically exist that he doesn't own.
This is a weird double negative.
I haven't invested in cybercurrency (beyond the time I invested on SteemIt) because I realized that the moment Wall Street sunk its claws in the industry, cybercurrencies would be held hostage to the derivatives created in the big banks. Cyber-currencies would eventually follow the other derivatives produced by big banks.
While I am not bullish on cybercurrency, I am bullish on the independent exchanges that cybercurrency has created.
Each cybercurrency is based on an exchange (hint, an Open Ledger is actually an exchange). While cybercurrency itself is really risky, the exchange systems created by cybercurrencies could be used to create alternative investments to the big banks ... that is if the exchanges could find away around the security laws that force people to invest through centralized banks.
The steady decline of cybercurrencies is sad. I am really bullish on the exchanges. I would love to see advocates of the industry turn from dreams of creating a new monetary system to creating alternative mechanisms for investing in real world things.
The cyberworld gave people a taste of what the people could do if they broke the control of the big banks and Wall Street.
The question now is: Can the people behind cybercurrency break the self created illusions that blockchain is a revolution and come to see that real gold could be found through the creation of independent exchanges.
