http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures
This is not unprecedented. If you look at weather futures, for example, nobody's going to want to take delivery of a petagram of cool air. Or think about index futures: who wants to receive 1 share of 500 different stocks at settlement time? When the underlying commodity is hard to work with and people still want to gamble^W hedge their risk, cash settlement solves plenty of problems.
That makes sense here. People who need wheat or steel to run their business and want to lock in prices might buy futures. But approximately nobody actually has a business need to deliver 1,000 bitcoins in February. At best, they might want to hedge some sort of risk. But more likely, it's straight up speculation from people who don't care about Bitcoin as such, but just want to get in on the action.
Many investors want exposure to Bitcoin. A significant subset therof are perfectly happy with the financial system as is. They want Bitcoin to look like any other financial asset. These futures are the beginning of Wall Street serving that demand.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. Not all futures work like this. Review investments with a lawyer and/or investment advisor.
How can they grantee 'legality' of the coins being traded by those participants in the 2nd scenario? Let's say then the coins being traded in the 2nd scenario are identified by the IRS as 'bad coins' - will they freeze the coins held by that account until the legal dispute is settled?
How can you grantee the legality of coins in an option contract if the coins held by one party prior to the contract expiration are seized?
I'm very curious how they're going to handle these scenarios. Personally, I wouldn't trade on this.