Can paper derivatives effect the underlying? Yes. Can it get to the point where the tail's wagging the dog? Possible, and therere examples in history when that happened, but i don't believe that it's happening with BTC.

Just a hypothetical, lets image you have 100.000 cash settled futures contracts which you got at an average price of $40.000/BTC, they expire today and lets say they use exchange's XYZ spot as a reference rate.
Imagine that current spot on XYZ is $37.500.
1-You don't do anything, Futures settle at $37,5k, you loose $2.500 per contract so you're down $250MM total. That sucks!

2-You look at XYZ and notice that the ask side of the book is pretty thin, you estimate that there will only be BTC5.000 for sale between $37,5k and $42,5k. You transfer $200MM to XYZ and buy everything in sight until $42.5k.
=You're successful and price closes at $42,5k. You're up $2,5k per contract or $250M from futures, but you bought BTC5k for $200MM, so you end up with $50MM and BTC5k profit.
=You're not successful and market actually moves against you and settles at $35k. You lost $500MM on futures, and paid $200M for BTC5k which are now only worth $175MM. -525MM REKT

And it works the other way around. If you sold futures, and then try to short the spot to bring it down so you're more profitable.

Problem is you need to corner the market to be able to pull this off, and there are always bigger whales. Futures platforms are not that dumb too, so theyre using weighted averages across multiple exchanges as a reference rate https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/cryptocurrency-indices/cf-bitcoin-reference-rate.html

There are hedge fund market makers and then there are youtube daily traders that cant do basic math. Don't confuse the two.

BAKKT is not even on a map anymore, do they even still offer BTC futures? Binance is currently the biggest dog and believe they're BTC settled. https://analytics.skew.com/dashboard/bitcoin-futures

Edit: fillippone popped in right on time, he has a whole thread on futures https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5188060

gaming the close on futures is illegal.  However gaming the spot price in bitcoin is hardly enforceable...

Q: "When do I push the BUY button?"

Unclear words of wisdom by Artie 'Sharkey' Hayes ;-)

https://blog.bitmex.com/bottomless/

TL;DR: I want to see 28.5k to call a bottom. Will it actually happen? Not necessarily. Look at corporate bond rate spread for a glance into the near future.

@Torque - And what if...

Paranoia Corner

The IMF is so pissed off by Bukele that they will actively suppress* bitcoin, already in a rough spot at the moment, just to be able to say "We told you! Guys, see what happens when you leave good, reliable fiat for crazy internet money? Poor country's rekt now."


* Short paper btc, buy physical and dump, etc.

Overall I agree with your points strawbs in respect to both the ongoing above-and-beyond transparency of both Saylor and Microstrategies.. and also the disingenuine Saylor/MSTR bashing that is going on... However, I think that it would be fair to give some kind of acknowledgement towards some of Saylor/MSTR's aggressive approach and even to acknowledge that his approach has become more aggressive with the passage of time - even given that he (and his company) has only been in bitcoin for around a year and a half.

Any of us can read more into details in fillippone's MSTR thread.

I personally consider the whole MSTR bitcoin strategy to be interesting and part of the reason that it is so interesting is partly due to it's level of aggressiveness, creativity and even MSTR's coupling of a BTC educational campaign... that was saying.. this is how we did this, and you can do it too.. here's a blueprint... genius really.

Saylor has even described that he became increasingly obsessed with BTC, and so he kind of categorizes his earliest entrance into BTC as more conservative, since they ONLY invested with about 75% of their cash on hand, and then in subsequent months they continued to invest with additional cash flow that came in... likely a similar ratio to use around 75% of the new cashflow to buy bitcoin and the other 25%-ish to keep for operating expenses...

Thereafter, Saylor/MSTR started to employ various kinds of debt instruments - and surely some kinds of creativity with that including some leveraging of company equity to in order to create some additional lines of credit that would be used for buying bitcoin.

So, there is a bit of a technically they are using leverage because they issued various kinds of debt and equity instruments and there is some needs to pay back the debt instruments in the coming 5-7 years and the equity instruments end up diluting share value.. but surely that money generated through equity instruments has gone towards buying BTC.. so perhaps could be considered another kind of leveraging of the good will of the company. 

For sure, there are a lot of people who seem scared about how MSTR/Saylor has been playing this whole matter, and surely there might be some attempts to manipulate the markets in order that MSTR/Saylor fails in profiting from his BTC accumulation strategies - which surely seems like it would be quite difficult (maybe not impossible but probably a long shot) to cause BTC prices to be down for so long that Saylor/MSTR becomes a loser, and the fact that Saylor/MSTR had a bit of a head start on this matter, it would likely cost any manipulators way more value than they may well be willing to lose in order to really have any meaningful chances to cause Saylor/MSTR to become losers in the way that they have played these bitcoin-related cards.


Of course there is a considerable amount of analysis contained in those pictures that is much greater than my own analysis.. in which on December 16, I had asserted that there is around a 2.5% chance that we could get above $800k in the next year.. and even if I tweak my numbers down a bit, I am much more bullish than Ark invest... but they have better data.. for sure.

By the way, I found that above specific graph on slide 55 in this attachment that you linked, upon linked upon linked... hahahahaha... no problema.

https://fillippone.altervista.org/ARK_BigIdeas2022.pdf

Let's get into the nitty gritty.. $1.36 by 2030 is pretty damned conservative, no?    Now, if our top is already in for this cycle, then maybe $1.36 million by 2030 is not seeming very conservative at all.. so maybe we have to see what the top for this cycle is going to be?  Do we get at least in the $200k to $300k.. range?  Then yeah.. $1.36 would be modest for the next 4 years thereafter.. so that would put us at late 2027 early 2028... Part of the problem is trying to figure out where each leg is going to go.. but it still seems that $1.36 million by 2030 is fairly conservative - which I think those kinds of think tanks should be erroring on the side of conservative anyhow, no?

I know OT but fuck it made me laugh what an absolute shit show ETH and it's leaders are

https://twitter.com/ethdotorg/status/1485644472880877572



"We've removed all uses of 'Eth2' terminology on http://ethereum.org"

Now no one can say Eth 2.0 will never come, because they don't even call it that anymore. Genius!

^^^didn't somebody doxxed it as an Uphold wallet?