Every financial market has bets, some are bets on the availability of a certain product, the price of a certain product at a certain point in time and on productivity and all markets depend on supply and demand, in metal markets the supply is the amount of metal that was produced this year, in Bitcoin that amount is fixed so people can’t bet on it. What you can bet on is how much it costs to mine Bitcoin at a certain time, specifically the difficulty, as the difficulty rises miners need more powerful, and probably more expensive, machines to be able to compete.

For anyone wanting to enter the mining business, this is the biggest risk there is, and while commodity markets offer futures and options to hedge risks, currently Bitcoin doesn’t employ this.

That’s why developer Tamas Blummer suggested the OP_DIFFICULTY, an opcode to enable hedges without any 3rd party interference, settled on the blockchain.