I think bitcoin can be and is being price distorted, just as gold because like gold the bitcoin futures market doesn't need to be backed by bitcoin. In the big picture the central banks don't care about losing profit because they effectively have an infinite number of dollars to play with, they care about control. So they have no problem effectively printing up dollars to short competitors. (maybe secretly paying off longs on the side to not take delivery)

But I think there might be a technology work-around with bitcoin too. It may be possible to sell or borrow bitcoins locked at a certain date in the future. This way you would actually need to have bitcoins to short them, and you would already be in control of one if you longed it, and if other non bitcoin markets price at a different rate, arbitrage should kick in and kill it real quick. I haven't thought this all the way through, so excuse me if it sounds off.

Also, lets say you short gold, and you make a profit, and you use that profit to buy more "real" gold, always making sure your net gold longs is greater than your short till physical gold runs out. This is the free market way of bypassing these kinds of short games. But banks can't and won't do that, because they are too in the system. But bitcoin is different, large players don't need to be in the system to use them and don't need to be "qualified" investors. They could play this game, using the profit to buy on the street in another country in large scale without attracting attention.

Luckily, the status-quo bias of the statists allowed bitcoin to get where it has gotten.

This proves once and for all that not even they believe in unbacked money, that is, until they did. Hmmm.