I guess it’s only right that Bitcoin should stage some kind of furious rally ahead of the CBOE futures launch today at 6 p.m. EST.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last two days setting the stage for what quite a few people think is a truly terrible idea.

“The pretty sharp rise we have seen in bitcoin in just the last couple of weeks has probably been driven by optimism ahead of the futures launch,” Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab in Austin told Reuters today, adding that “you are going to open up the market to a whole lot of people who aren’t currently in bitcoin.” Right. But opening the market to them doesn’t mean they’ll jump in.

head of the launch, Bitcoin fell sharply from its Thursday highs. Of course this all depends on where you’re getting your prices (see here), but suffice to say that headed into Sunday, it was down 31% from Thursday’s ridiculous peak above $19,700 using Coinbase. But that’s ok, because this is Bitcoin we’re talking about which means it’s prone to rallying at the drop of a hat and on Sunday morning, it suddenly rose some 20% off the Saturday evening lows:

Make no mistake, the pricing discrepancies you can see on full display in that chart are an issue. “If investors are trying to hedge a bitcoin purchase, they will have to make sure they buy bitcoins on an exchange that matches up most closely with a particular contract,” Bloomberg wrote on Friday adding that the gaps seem to support Jeffery Sprecher’s argument that the underlying market here isn’t sound as “large price spreads indicate liquidity problems and a lack of active professional dealers or traders who would normally arbitrage these differences away rapidly.”

And then there’s the issue of whether the “whales” will collude to manipulate the price and one certainly wonders what would keep them from profiting on that manipulation via futures. “There’s no transparency to speak of in this market,” Martin Mushkin, a lawyer who focuses on bitcoin recently told Bloomberg, adding that “in the securities business, everything that’s material has to be disclosed. In the virtual currency world, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on.”

Even if they aren’t colluding, how does one manage an exit from these mammoth positions without causing an unwind in the market? As one Wall Street veteran I spoke with the other day noted, the fact that 1,000 people own 40% of the market makes “Bitcoin look a bit like the Fed’s balance sheet unwind.”

We’ll invariably be writing more about this later, but for now, we’ll leave you with a summary of how the futures launch is being treated by brokers and banks (via the same Reuters piece linked above):

• Interactive Brokers plans to offer its customers access to the first bitcoin futures when trading goes live, but bars clients from assuming short positions and has margin requirements of at least 50 percent.
• Several online brokerages including Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade will not allow the trading of the newly launched futures from day one.
• Some of the big U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup will not immediately clear bitcoin trades for clients, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
• Goldman Sachs Group Inc on Thursday said it is planning to clear bitcoin futures for certain clients.