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Given their volatility and lack of a derivatives market to drive liquidity, I wonder what the banking capitalization requirements for crypto-currencies will be
by motohagiography 6y ago
Given their volatility and lack of a derivatives market to drive liquidity, I wonder what the banking capitalization requirements for crypto-currencies will be.
I can see the argument of "it's just another currency for exchange, how is this hard," but the difference today is it's super high volatility, without a rescue facility, and given bitcoin's public ledger of every bad person who has ever owned it, it is arguably less fungible than cash because MC would have to track the provenance of every block it had on its books.
Your mastercard probably won't be a bitcoin wallet either due to card chip capabilities, and I'd bet heavily they will just support it as another virtual currency and do your real bitcoin settlement asynchronously on their back end in a hypothecated and risk-managed form, and even then it will be a private ledger with their bitcoin capital levels levered way up.
IMO, the entire levered business model and capitalization requirements when applied to cryptos sets banks up for the squeeze to end all squeezes, like when countries demand delivery of their physical gold from bullion banks and it creates political instability, except next time it will be 4chan organizing to get delivery of their bitcoin. For an issuer to act as a bank maintaining a float of cryptocurrencies to facilitate settlement seems like a super interesting hard problem.
Edit: this will probably be handled by reserving the right to pay you in bonds or IoUs instead of bitcoin, just like paper gold and silver today, which reduces the usefulness of doing your BTC payments through them in the first place.
- 3np 6y agoCME has derivates. As do several other exchanges. Some argue that the derivates are actually part of driving price movements these days, but it's not the consensus yet. Interesting take, BTW - I don't see it as impossible. There's some possibility this is the greatest trojan horse ever (unless it was just inevitable just like the internet was).
- hntrader 6y agoDerivatives are typically leading crypto spot markets (although recently it flipped for a while) It's been that way for a few years. I'm talking Bitmex, Binance derivatives, not CME.