[uberrr]

Could these be shorted? It’s only a matter of time until one or more of the unregulated exchanges cuts and runs or gets shut down and seized.

[ThrustVectoring]

Yes. That's the entire point of having a futures market - generally, the producers of a commodity will be net short the futures contract in order to de-risk their productive investment. Buying a mining rig trades todays dollars for future BTC. Shorting a BTC futures trades future BTC for todays dollars.

[rb808]

Yes, by definition every future has the same number of longs as shorts.

[Sangermaine]

Or "gets hacked" and all of the coins are "stolen".

[tmaic]

These will be derivatives, not actual bitcoins. When you enter a contract you will only care about the price level of the Bitcoin Reference Rate, the contracts aren't holding any actual bitcoins, so there is nothing to hack and steal.

[mediocrejoker]

I'm not sure if that's accurate though. If a large quantity of coins disappeared, surely that would have ripple effects through to even the most convoluted derivatives?

[6nf]

Yes you can short them. There's a twitter bot following the losses of those foolish enough to do so.

https://twitter.com/BitmexRekt