Story - First Bitcoin Futures Launched
http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/symbol-look-up?company=BITCOIN%20FUTURES
So when you search the CBOE for Bitcoin Futures you get these three results back.
If I’m not mistaken these are futures contracts that are deliverable January 2018, February 2018 and March 2018.
The January 2018 contract is the only one with data right now because they are 30 day futures.
http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/detailed-quotes?ticker=BTC%2fF8
The symbol is BTC/F8 if you want to search for it on the CBOE website.
At time of recording the price is $15,300 and the contract expires on the 26th of January 2018.
So if you consider that futures were originally designed to aid manufacturers and farmers so they could lock in prices for their goods, you can imagine how futures could help boost cryptocurrency adoption by allowing retailers to basically buy insurance against the price of Bitcoin falling.
Say Dell receives $1,000 worth of Bitcoin today as payment for a laptop and then a week goes by and Bitcoin drops 20% to $800, Dell’s in trouble.
If they bought a Bitcoin Futures contract for a small fee, they reserve the right to sell that Bitcoin for $1,000 on the 26th of January 2018.
If the price of Bitcoin goes up in the meantime and it ends up being worth $1,200 then they can just choose not to exercise the contract, let it expire and then sell the Bitcoin on the open market for $1,200.
That’s how it’s supposed to work but because these are cash settled, Dell would just receive the $200 extra in cash.
What happened to the Bitcoin and altcoin prices today?
https://www.coinigy.com/main/markets/BITF/BTC/USD
Story - ViaBTC To Launch BCH Exchange
https://news.bitcoin.com/viabtc-announce-new-cryptocurrency-exchange-with-bitcoin-cash-as-base-currency/
It’s no surprise this story comes from Bitcoin.com who are die hard supporters of Bitcoin Cash.
It’s also no surprise that it’s ViaBTC who are doing this because they were trading Bitcoin Cash futures I believe and putting some hash power behind other Bitcoin alternatives such as Segwit2x when it was around.
The story is that ViaBTC are going to create a new cryptocurrency exchange with Bitcoin Cash as the base currency instead of Bitcoin.
That means BCH will be the main currency everything else is traded against in the same way that BTC is on most existing exchanges.
http://www.coinex.com/btc.html
They are going to call it Coinex and here is the website.
Most interesting to me is the fact that they are going to base the exchange in the UK. Kind of brave given the recent news about the government wanting to heat up regulation on cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to Bitcoin.com they incorporated on the 4th of December, which I was able to verify as true by going to companies house:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11093144
Why are ViaBTC doing this?
From a business point of view they’ll want to add value to Bitcoin Cash so the coins they mine are worth more, plain and simple.
The CoinEx website says it is coming in December, so launching this month.
Bitcoin better get its skates on before Bitcoin Cash starts taking its market share.
According to Blocktivity http://blocktivity.info/
Bitcoin Cash is the number 8 blockchain by transactional volume at around 17,000 transactions per day.
Story - Bitcoin Fights Back With Lightning
https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0-compatibility-achieved-f9d22b7b19c4
Just to balance out the analysis here, some big news came out about Bitcoin last week which promises to keep it ahead of Bitcoin Cash.
The development teams working on the Lightning network has now successfully completed the first ever lightning transactions on the main Bitcoin network.
Not only that, because there are several different development teams working on their own implementation of the Lightning network, they have been working together to make sure all the various are compatible.
We don’t want 3 independent Lightning networks, we want one big one so it’s as interconnected as possible.
The recent tests confirmed that yes, no matter which version of the Lightning software you use, you are able to send an instant Lightning transaction to anyone else for a tiny transaction fee.
The three development teams are ACINQ (who have developed the eclair client), Blockstream (who have developed the c-lightning client) and Lightning Labs (who have developed the LND client).
If you’d like to see a demo of a transaction buying coffee which goes through all the various software versions there’s a couple of videos embedded into this Medium post.
When the Lightning network fully launches it’ll take some time for the network to establish itself.
Because it’s essentially a new network on top of Bitcoin, the strength of the network depends on how many people will run Lightning nodes and relay transactions.
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