Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Bulls 1, Bears 0: Bitcoin futures jumped 24% to $18,545 from $15,000 on the digital currency's first day of trading on the exchange run by Cboe Global Markets. Traders had anticipated that futures contracts would help reduce the volatility of bitcoin by bringing in both bullish and bearish investors, the Wall Street Journal noted. "But in fact, the rollout of Cboe's futures actually sparked intense volatility and appeared to pull the price of bitcoin itself higher."
More than $75 million of bitcoin futures were traded on the first day, the Financial Times reported, "representing a modest but significant sum for derivatives on a digital currency whose underlying utility is still a matter of debate."
It's not debatable to Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who issued a long warning Monday to investors about the dangers of trading the volatile currency, which the SEC doesn't regulate.

However, it does regulate initial coin offerings, and on Monday it stopped Munchee, a San Francisco company that operates a restaurant review app, from offering $15 million in digital tokens to raise money from investors. The SEC said the sale was illegal because it was advertised to the public without the proper disclosures. It was the first time the SEC
It's also not debatable to Lawrence Baxter, a law professor at Duke, where he co-directs the Global Financial Markets Center. He thinks the price of bitcoin is headed to zero, not infinity and beyond. "In the long run, the smart bet is against bitcoin, for at least four reasons," he says in a Journal op-ed piece.
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All of those warnings haven't stopped people from buying bitcoin, however, and the world's biggest cybercurrency exchanges
Much of the mania is being driven by millions of individual investors in Asia, the Journal says. "Despite the attention focused on the launch of bitcoin futures in the U.S.,
Quotable
"Bitcoin is one of the few markets we've ever had in history where you've seen these astronomical gains around the world and the retail investors in Asia are the ones driving it. It feels like this whole thing is being