Futures industry participants, including major banks that clear securities transactions, have warned about the risks to the system if the bitcoin price collapses and people trading bitcoin futures get hit with margin calls.
And if the origins of bitcoin aren’t sketchy enough — created by a shadowy and unverified person or persons going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto — sites where it has been trading and where people store their coins in virtual wallets have been subject to hacking and theft.
Just this week some $70 million of bitcoin was stolen from a site called NiceHash, and the previously best-known exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins, then worth $450 million, went missing.
No less than JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Warren Buffett have called it, respectively, a fraud and a mirage. Though on Friday, Dimon told CNBC he was open to the use of cryptocurrencies if properly controlled and regulated.
