Very interesting that degens want to bet on hashrate!
In my defense, Perps are just futures without an expiry date.
This is true but use of the word "just" is a little misleading.
The lack of expiry date creates huge differences.
For example if I buy puts or calls options and the market doesn't move in my favor I will lose everything I spent buying the contract. This isn't true with perps unless my position gets liquidated. And speaking of liquidated... calls and puts CANT get liquidated, which is the biggest difference of all.
The fact that options can't get liquidated makes it much harder for market manipulators to bust aggressively leveraged positions. Perps make it much easier for centralized exchanges to cheat their clients using their own insider information to trade against degens.
Also, market makers that sell options contracts need to hedge their positions or they'll be open to insane amounts of risk. This is because crypto is volatile and the profit on selling such a contract is static/capped while the losses are theoretically limitless (on calls anyway). Perps do not have this problem because the bulls are hedged against the bears and the fund rate financially incentivizes balance (normally the longs paying the shorts yield via fund-rate).
Certainly, there are many differences, and my wording did make the "expiry date" appear as the only outstanding factor.
That said, being someone not heavily involved with traditional finance, a lot of its concepts can be a tad confusing.
For example, I talked about "Futures" specifically, but you referenced "Options" in your comment, now I question if they are the same thing, I mean, I've always considered them different?
My understanding is that options involve paying a premium which(could?) becomes the only loss incurred in an event of the trade not being profitable, while with Futures,that does not exist and you can lose everything. Maybe I'm wrong?
That said, the funding rate is indeed an interesting piece of perpetual contracts, one that noob traders generally don't understand how it works, I've literally found people scream at exchanges over these fees and I can't blame anything more than the absence of proper guides on how these things work, extensively.
I personally began trading Perps without understanding(learning?) how they work, fundamentally.
I guess it's degen before learning.
I am learning all this stuff for the first time this year as well.
I wanted to say that options are a type of future, but the Internet doesn't seem to agree.
Even though the only difference between a future and option is the lack of the option.
A futures contract forces the trade after a certain amount of time while options do not.
The Internet likes to classify them as "derivatives"
Oh look I have have this in my archive from... 2019... lol.
Ah, yes, derivatives, the one word I have to look up the meaning every time I want to use it.
Thanks to BitMex, we have Perps within crypto as I wouldn't trade options or futures even if I was offered the capital for free.
That said, ChatGPT frames "the lack of option in futures" contract as the "absence of obligation," essentially why the "premium fee" exists in options, to get away from the "obligation" of fulfilling the contract.