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You can buy put options on deribit.com (with a huge spread, mind you). https://www.deribit.com/main#/options

It's effectively shorting selling, except you know in advance how much you stand to lose (what you paid for the option), as opposed to borrowing bitcoins and selling them, and then having to buy them back at some unknown price in the future.

Unlike futures (say a 2 year crude oil contract), you can only short bitcoin for day-trading. The trick is that in most exchanges you pay a huge fee everyday to hold your position. So you can't say, "I think Bitcoin will crash in 2018" and open that position. In a few days the fees eat up everything and you are forced to liquidate at the price that day. (see bitfinex, whaleclub, etc, etc)

That's not necessarily true. I work on BitMEX, and we offer quarterly futures contracts that don't have holding fees. Today, with the price movement, they've been even trading at a discount to spot.

You can do all kinds of crazy bets with bitcoin, and do it leveraged up to your eyeballs. People do it all the time.

You can short Bitcoin at Bitfinex and ICBIT.

Wasn't Bitfinex hacked?

It was. Incident Briefs: https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/