SecondMarket Opens Institutional Bitcoin Trading, 25 BTC Minimum

coinreport.net

25 points·edward··8 comments

US $13K is laughably small for an "institutional" block. Block trading in US equities is more like 10000 shares (keep in mind 100 shares is "one lot" i.e. the minimum quantity for typical orders). Since BTC is trading around the same dollar value as GOOG now, imagine what would happen if someone announced institutional trading with a minimum quantity of 25 shares of GOOG. It's a decent chunk of change for your IRA, but doesn't even register for an institution.

If the goal is to facilitate large orders, the minimum quantity should be at least 1000 BTC. Institutional traders would not pick up the phone for less than that.

Why would it matter to an institution what the minimum is? If they want to purchase 1000 BTC instead of 25, would SecondMarket actually force them to make forty 25 BTC purchases?

I believe that he is putting it into perspective in case that some people believe that 25BTC is too high of a minimum.

Do they let you short Btc?

I assume you mean to say that you think this is a lousy idea and indicates that BTC/USD is about to fall. However, if you're serious, the answer is that while there is no mechanism to short BTC/fiat like you can a NYSE-traded equity, there are venues in which you can buy and sell BTC/fiat futures, like ICBIT. You can also participate in "betting" pools, which are derivatives similar to certain types of options, such as BTCLevels and BTCOracle.

Caveat emptor, obviously.

On my iPhone Chrome, no actual article appears. Just headline and comments.

Works just fine on my iPhone 4 Chrome

Reply on news.ycombinator.com