On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 6:50 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

PS: For anyone who wants a crypto currency backed by gold, that's functionally equivalent to a gold ETF, of which there are several, such as ticker symbols IAU, GLD, GTU, SGOL, and AGOL. They do what they do perfectly adequately, but they are in no sense currency. Bubble sceptics can trade put options on them. Too bad there's no options on bitcoins.

There already are options on bitcoins. #bitcoin-otc [1] nominally supports them in its order book, though I see little use so far [2]. Apparently someone wrote a put for 100BTC at a strike price of $0.75/BTC with a 1.50BTC premium two months ago, maturing 31 May 2011 [3]; the option did in fact sell but I have no idea whether it was exercised. Bitcoin calls have been around on the forum since at least January [4], complete with risk reversal strategies ([5] is a textbook example of a collar though not a zero-premium one). [1] http://www.bitcoin-otc.com [2] http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php?notes=option [3] http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/4585101363/first-bitcoin-put-option-contrac... [4] http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=2986.0 [5] http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=2986.msg41580#msg41580 Cheers, --mlp _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE