Shorting essentially just means borrowing the item to short, and then selling the borrowed item below market price.
You could certainly borrow bitcoins from someone (if they were willing to loan them to you), and then sell the borrowed coins on an exchange. However, the existing exchanges don't support "naked short selling," which would means posting an "ask" to sell bitcoins that you don't actually have on deposit in your exchange account. But, there is nothing to prevent someone from making such an exchange, or just posting a Craigslist ad that says, "I have 1 million Bitcoins which I am willing to sell to anyone for $0.001 cents each," when you don't have the actual coins yet, just some friends who have agreed to loan you their coins. That would essentially be a retro-tech equivalent of a naked short sell. -Mike On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Warren Smith <warren....@gmail.com> wrote: > By the way, re Jameson Quinn saying he'd short-sell bitcoins... > is it actually possible to short them? > > -- > Warren D. Smith > http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking > "endorse" as 1st step) > and > math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info > -- Full name: Michael Patrick Frank Email addr.: michael.patrick.fr...@gmail.com (pers. email) Snail mail: 820 Hillcrest Ave., Quincy, FL, 32351-1618 Phone/voicemail: (413) 842-6670 (main number, uses Google Voice) Webpage URL: http://www.facebook.com/M.P.Frank (pers. profile)
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