23 ms·

Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

317 points by abhi3 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago
Meanwhile, it's 12 hours since Bitcoin Cash actually mined a block. The only reason the price is so high is because people can't make transactions to send their BCH to exchanges. EDIT: My mistake. Originally said 20 hours. It's only 12.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  how is the price established?
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    answered my own question: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets some exchanges support it.
- Jenya_ 9y ago
  The delay in mining was required to trigger drastic difficulty reduction (20%). More details at https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adjustment_triggered_at_0940_utc/dl24nbj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adju...
  - matthewbauer 9y ago
    I'm confused. You're saying that the delay was intentional?
    - TD-Linux 9y ago
      It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjust...
      - matthewbauer 9y ago
        Okay that sounds more reasonable. My original thought was that it's not very decentralized if all the miners can agree to stop mining at any point. Economic reasons seem much more reasonable.
        cesarb 9y ago
        It's not very decentralized. According to https://cash.coin.dance/blocks https://cash.coin.dance/blocks ten of the 16 blocks so far on this fork have been mined by "Genesis Block 269-273 Hennessy Road Wan Chai Hong Kong", 3 have been mined by ViaBTC, and only 3 by someone else. These two pools together have around 80% of the hash rate on this fork.
- DoctorBit 9y ago
  Less than 12 hours.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    My bad, thanks. I was looking at median time instead of timestamp.
- RichardHeart 9y ago
  Block monitors for BitcoinCash https://cash.coin.dance/ https://cash.coin.dance/ https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/ http://blockdozer.com/insight/
- discombobulate 9y ago
  The popular press are crypto-illiterate.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- makomk 9y ago
  Even if they could make transactions, the exchanges aren't accepting deposits of BCH. The only exception I'm aware of is ViaBTC and apparently they want 20 confirmations (about a week at current hashrate, I think). The BCH market cap that's quoted in this article is rather misleading because nearly all of those coins simply cannot be sold on exchanges currently. Regarding the question in the replies: when the fork happened, all the BTC in the exchanges at the time split off into an equal amount of BCH. The various BCH/BTC markets are effectively trading people's claims to portions of those much smaller pools of BCH that were already on the exchange when it forked. (Those claims can't necessarily be converted into actual BCH yet either; for example, Kraken isn't currently allowing BCH withdrawals.)
  - runeks 9y ago
    Wait a minute, what? How can Kraken claim to have a BCH/BTC market if you can’t deposit BCH and sell them?
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      For BTC they already hold pre-fork.
    - TD-Linux 9y ago
      They are just trading their internal accounting of BCH, by crediting BTC holders with BCH. Nothing is hitting the blockchain. Bitfinex did this too, but royally screwed up: http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-accounting-disaster/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-a...
- reefoctopus 9y ago
  This also conveniently prevents people from dumping BCH to drive down the price. The number of confirmations required by most exchanges in order to guard against double spending Sybil attacks will take days. The price will continue to rise as it makes its way into the news. By the time people can dump their BCH it is likely there will be substantial momentum behind it. The launch has been brilliantly orchestrated.
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    But the amount of existing BCH is so high, that the moment it starts reaching the exchanges the dump will be earth-shattering. If only there was a way to short BCH... :(
    - aero142 9y ago
      A short is just a loan and a contract. If you can find your own counterparty, you might be able to do it.
      - danmaz74 9y ago
        I thought about this, but who would make a loan to somebody they don't know without a platform with sufficient guarantees? And anyway, it would need to be BCH which is already on one of the few exchanges that allow to trade it, as it's impossible for the time being to move it around (which is the very reason why the price is high there right now). Not very likely. On the other hand, if anybody who is long on BCH wanted to talk about a future or an option, I'm all ears :D
        jdmichal 9y ago
        Sufficient guarantees are just a contract. The result is the same either way if something goes wrong -- you take the counterparty to court.
        danmaz74 9y ago
- mrb 9y ago
  2 blocks were mined right after you posted on HN: Block 478571 on Aug 2, 2017 16:20:19 AM UTC (4.7MB! since it holds ~12 hours worth of transactions) Block 478572 on Aug 2, 2017 16:36:31 AM UTC http://blockdozer.com/insight/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/blocks
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Coinbase has clearly stated the company is not taking customers' Bitcoin Cash for themselves So effectively, it's as if they just burned all of the Bitcoin Cash they were holding?
- ukd1 9y ago
  no - they're just not doing anything with it.
  - polotics 9y ago
    Where have they explicitly contractually commited to this?
  - jpmattia 9y ago
    > no - they're just not doing anything with it. "We're not taking it, we're just not giving it to you."
- eximius 9y ago
  Not unless they deleted the keys holding the original, which would be unutterably stupid. They just havent credited their customers. They could do so at any time.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    They can't delete the keys without also losing the BTCs. They could transfer the BCC to non-existent addresses, though.
- imaginenore 9y ago
  They still have the control over their clients' BCH, just not moving it. They didn't burn anything.
- jncraton 9y ago
  They are most certainly still holding them. They would actually have to take intentional steps to burn them, and that would be silly to do as they'd literally be throwing away money. It seems that there is an assumption from Coinbase that BCC will be nearly worthless, so it isn't worth building the infra to handle both currencies. They can choose to make users BCC available if there is enough demand for it. Here's what Coinbase themselves say about this: > Coinbase does not intend to interact with the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, or to access bitcoin cash (BCC). In order to safely and securely access bitcoin cash, Coinbase would need to undertake a process of designing and testing significant changes to our systems — including hot and cold storage. This is one of the core reasons customers will not be able to withdraw bitcoin cash after the fork on August 1st, 2017. > If this decision were to change in the future and we were to access bitcoin cash, we would distribute to customers bitcoin cash (BCC) associated with bitcoin (BTC) balances at the time of the fork on August 1st, 2017. Coinbase would not keep the bitcoin cash associated with customer bitcoin (BTC) balances for ourselves.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
They had the opportunity to move their funds and plenty of notice.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  And Coinbase was pretty good about getting pretty much all of the massive exodus of coins out of their system and out of cold storage in time. And they were pretty explicit that they wouldn't be supporting the BCC chain. I get it people are upset about possibly missing out on money, but Coinbase handled this about as good as they could.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    I mean, I was able get mine from Coinbase 3 hours before their deadline, and it only took a few minutes for it to pop up, and another 20 minutes to get the confirmations. I was considering just leaving them on there, but decided against it at the last minute, so I'm glad the '12 hour delays for Coinbase withdrawals' wasn't true. I do regret not informing others I know about the fork, though. They most likely still have their coins on Coinbase.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    No they didn't. They could have offered withdrawals of BCC, eliminating all uncertainty. That would be handling it "best". Or even a clear policy as to under which circumstances they will offer BCC would be better. (If they said they'd do withdrawals if the price stays over 0.1BTC, that'd have placated a lot of people.) Giving notice so as to not totally screw customers is sort of the least they could do. How they get any sort of praise for this is bizarre.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      Even the exhanges that support just about every currency out there still don't allow deposits/withdraws of BCC right now. There really is a lot of uncertainty around this whole situation, and due to the nature of a split a mistake in one of the coins can cause the user to lose both of them. It's not an area that I want my services rushing into and making mistakes. If I were in Coinbase's position, I'd make sure that I'm doing everything to fully support and secure the currencies that I officially support, and maybe support some forks later if there is massive demand or there are more stable/secure methods of handling it. I mean right now the biggest "wallets" for BCC are rushed, filled with bugs, and have significant issues in some areas. If they had said "we will allow you to withdraw BCC" and they didn't allow it right away, people would be significantly more upset (rightfully so in my opinion). At least the way they handled it they clearly and publicly announced that if you wanted to deal with BCC, you should move your funds out of Coinbase, and they gave multiple notifications over multiple days about this. And mind you, they did offer a clear explanation of when they will offer BCC, They won't. That's about as clear as you can get. They might change that in the future, but you can't say they didn't warn you if they never do.
hardwaresofton 9y ago
Does anyone know any exchanges that are selling BCC/BCH?
- sterban 9y ago
  https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
- neals 9y ago
  I found myself having my BTC assets copied to BCH on kraken.com, which I think is the best thing ever.
  - makomk 9y ago
    Having your BTC on the exchange split into BCH the time of the fork is the only way I'm aware of to get your BCH onto Kraken (or the other exchanges) because they're not currently accepting BCH deposits. Unless it's already on an exchange that supports it or you've got a time machine you're basically out of luck for now if you want to sell your BCH, and even then people have been having problems with the exchanges falling over.
IgorPartola 9y ago
Sorry but what exactly is Bitcoin Cash? It seems like it's a fork in the BTC blockchain, but what prompted it and what gives it any sort of value, let alone a $12*10^9? Is it somehow technically superior? Is the move going to be to have BTC and BTC Cash exist side by side? Or are they going to fight for the market?
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  You can read up on it all over. But the short answer is Bitcoin Cash forked Bitcoin and has 8MB blocks, which would have eliminated congestion and lowered fees on Bitcoin during the past year. Both sides (small Vs big) have economic incentives behind them, making the argument extra vitriolic. But larger blocks allow on chain growth, keeping it peer to peer without requiring any 3rd parties. (And the answer that 8x more bandwidth and storage makes it infeasible for enough people to run nodes rings false.)
  - yebyen 9y ago
    It doesn't make anything infeasible today. But if you think both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are going to be around in 20 years, and you want to support both, now you've just added 800% to your annual storage growth rate. (Assuming that BCC always mines full blocks, which I will admit seems unlikely) I have to be honest, I was keeping a cold wallet with some ~1-2 BTC in it until the price reached record high territory in the last few months, and it took me several days to download the entire blockchain against my wallet.dat. I had to free up well over 100GB to get the coins out. If I hadn't done this dozens of times already (when the blockchain was smaller) and had some degree of confidence that it was going to succeed and grant me access to the coins, I probably would have been freaking out as I reached about the 36 hour mark into the process. I can't imagine it's going to get better in the next couple of years. Maybe "Moore's law for storage" will outpace economic growth in the Cryptocurrency sector, and in 20 years my mobile phone will be so powerful that it will no longer be a concern. That sounds like a bit of a gamble, doesn't it?
    - PretzelPirate 9y ago
gtirloni 9y ago
Coinbase did the right thing by warning their users beforehand that they wouldn't work with BCH. They could have simply ignored it altogether and continue business as usual like nothing had ever happened. Now after the fork, if people want to convert BTC to BCH, they have to go through a intermediary currency, just like many banks won't convert USD to $unknown_currency sometimes. It doesn't surprise me there are talks about lawsuits, cryptocurrencies will have a hard time shaking off all the speculators and scammers.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Sure, 4 days before the fork and also locking up withdrawals and setting time limits. I could accept Coinbase saying they dont plan on supporting it in the long term, but its kind of ridiculous to think that Coinbase can make a blogpost, and potentially appropiate millions of dollars of the coinbase users and thats fine because it was said before. Not to mention that I've been particularly locked out of the platform for months due to the slow and fuzzy account recovery process, and that the delays on it didnt allow me to retreive the coins in time between the notice, the lockup and the account recovery process time. So no, I dont find Coinbase's position at all tenable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    Perhaps you would like to switch to my exchange? http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com
    - kgwgk 9y ago
      Bitcoin sex change? Are you affiliated with expert sex change?
    - smlsugarlumps 9y ago
      I don't trust a site named bitcoin sex change
vgprice 9y ago
But seriously, people threaten to sue the exchanges everytime they go down from insane amounts of traffic during a dip or spike.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
What I think all the press isn't making very clear is that to the best of my understanding for every Bitcoin you own, you get a Bitcoin Cash coin. There is no "conversion", it is free money for all BTC holders. Everyone who owned BTC, now owns BTC+BCC. Of course if your BTC is not real, but is held by an exchange such as Coinbase, how you get your BCC isn't at all clear.
- jncraton 9y ago
  > Of course if your BTC is not real, but is held by an exchange such as Coinbase, how you get your BCC isn't at all clear. Your BTC should still be "real", but the exchange holds the keys instead of you. Your point stands about it being unclear how you would access your BCC. If you aren't allowed access to your BCC, there's nothing preventing exchanges from dumping the BCC for cash as far as I can tell from a purely technical standpoint (IANAL).
  - simias 9y ago
    What if the exchange didn't actually hold the BTC but only had a line in the database with an "IOU xBTC"? Maybe at this point the exchange had used its stored BTC to speculate on an other market and attempt to increase its profets. Maybe they bought Ether or gold or Microsoft stock. Normally it doesn't matter as long as the exchange is capable of sending you back the coins when you claim them but in case of a fork they'd have to buy two coins instead.
    - jncraton 9y ago
      That's certainly a possibility. I was working from the assumption that Coinbase actually held BTC totaling the sum of all users account balances. Given the highly volatile nature of BTC and the nature of the BTC community (e.g. the conventional wisdom was to pull all funds from exchanges prior to the fork occurring), it seems quite irresponsible to not be holding funds as BTC. I'm aware that exchanges in the past have behaved very irresponsibly, but I'm hoping that Coinbase is the exception here as a well known US-based company.
  - 9y ago
galfarragem 9y ago
People who bought BTC on Coinbase/Gdax after the fork own the correspondent BCC also?
- jncraton 9y ago
  That shouldn't be the case. BTC purchased after the fork has no relationship to BCC. Bitcoin transactions included before block 478559 are both valid BTC and BCC transactions. Anything after that is only valid as one or the other depending on which chain it is included in.
- npongratz 9y ago
  After the fork, BTC and BCH are distinct and independent. So buying BTC after the fork would gives the buyer zero BCH.
  - galfarragem 9y ago
    So who owns the correspondent BCH (assuming that the seller was a coinbase user before the fork)? Coinbase? The previous owner?
    - pat2man 9y ago
      Coinbase has the keys for them, they have stated that if they ever accessed those coins they would make them available to the wallet holders.
brianberns 9y ago
As an outsider, the remarkable thing about this to me is that one can (for now) sell the same bitcoins twice, right? If I own 1 bitcoin pre-fork, I can sell it for $2700 and then sell the exact same bitcoin again as Bitcoin Cash for $700. Crazy.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jbb67 9y ago
  Well, you could if there was any practical way to sell the bitcoin cash version at the moment. I personally think it likely that once you can, you'll be lucky to get $7 for one.
  - brianberns 9y ago
    If there's no practical way to sell bitcoin cash, where does the $700 valuation come from?
    - undersuit 9y ago
      Demand to trade them, but it could all come crashing down like an overpriced IPO.
    - abhi3 9y ago
      In theory, it could be that currently the demand is way higher than the supply, if everyone were able to sell their BCC then the price could crash (assuming everyone would want to sell them as soon as they are able)
    - makomk 9y ago
      The handful of smaller exchanges that support Bitcoin Cash gave everyone who had Bitcoins on their exchanges at the time of the fork an equal balance in Bitcoin Cash, and it's that relatively small amount of on-exchange BCH that people have been trading. (I think one exchange allowed trading before the fork even happened, and just required people to have both BCH and BTC in order to make withdrawals before the fork.) Actual on-chain Bitcoin Cash cannot be sold right now as it can't be deposited in any of the exchanges, and buying it is iffy too due to some of them not allowing withdrawals either. The price of Bittrex BCH has also generally been about 40-50% higher than BCH on the other exchanges for some reason.
bdonlan 9y ago
It's an interesting situation, but assigning liability to coinbase for this seems like it'd be a problem long term. Unlike traditional securities, there's nothing stopping me from going out and making my own fork tomorrow - and then would all exchanges be required to add support for that fork, too? Where do you draw the line?
- btzll 9y ago
  This is not a random fork. This is a fork with almost $400 million 24 hour volume. Coinbase should allow users to withdraw their BCC, since they are sitting on a huge pile of BCC units, which belong to customers.
  - abhi3 9y ago
    And if the price of BCC were to crash to single digit USD in a week it takes for Coinbase to come to a decision then the customers would have lost a fortune.
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      They already came to a decision. They told people who wanted BCC to withdraw their coins before August 1st. Everyone who wanted BCC already has them.
      - lawn 9y ago
        ... Giving a few days to do it. Ignoring withdrawal limits the customers cannot raise.
        Alex3917 9y ago
        Customers could have sold their BTC for USD at any time and just held USD until after the fork. There isn't any functional difference between holding USD pre-fork or holding both BTC and BCH post-fork.
mxscho 9y ago
Some already mentioned this list showing some exchanges that currently offer the ability to trade BCH assets for BTC or fiat currency. [1] Note however that due to low count of blocks currently being mined for BCH there is no chance for the exchanges to get enough confirmations for deposited BCH from any (private, non-exchange) wallet to safely confirm the deposit. So the only BCH assets that are currently being sold are probably the ones that were granted by the exchanges to the people that did not bother to transfer their BTC credit into their self-controlled wallet previous to the fork. I think this is also a reason why BTC assets seem to be a bit overvalued right now. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
pera 9y ago
From the class-action lawsuit website "FAQ": > Coinbase allowed users to withdraw BTC prior to the hard fork > The process of transferring Bitcoin can be complex and potentially very risky even for experienced users. Additionally, creation of a new account or wallet on a different exchange is often a lengthy and difficult process. While Coinbase did suggest to users that they could move their BTC to a different wallet in order to obtain BCH, the procedure can be seen as prohibitive by a significant portion of users. Finally, many users reported slow or non-responsive site when trying to move their BTC from Coinbase prior to the lock-down that preceded the hard fork. First, transferring founds from one wallet to another is trivial in Bitcoin, and in fact it is easier than any other money transfer method that I know of. Second, if it really was that difficult then why they are, at the same time, accepting donations using Bitcoin and Ethereum on the same website?. Third, "Bitcoin Cash" is an altcoin, and anyone can create a similar fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, should Coinbase support them all?? because that would be ridiculous. I can not believe these people are serious...
- bradly 9y ago
  I had to move my coins out of Coinbase last week and it was very scary. I had never moved coins before and I even though the process seems simple, I had very little confidence in what I was doing. Honestly, I almost just left the coins in Coinbase figuring losing 10% of value from BCH is still probably positive equity compared to my perceived risk of losing it all which felt between 25% and 50%.
  - pera 9y ago
    What was the very scary part? you just need to copy and paste a Bitcoin address, it literally can not be simpler :) is it maybe the the alphanumeric hash that looks scary?
    - lawn 9y ago
      Handling a potentially large of money and keeping it secure? How to store the key? What happens if I loose my phone/computer? How can I protect myself from fire and theft? Which wallet to choose? How can I be certain I don't have a virus waiting to steal my coins? Did i copy my address correctly? That's a lot of uncertainty for "it literally can not be simpler".
barkingcat 9y ago
Haha why is there "fiduciary" duty when Coinbase is not a bank, not a security agency, and not any type of share that people bought into (ie customers are not shareholder). Coinbase can do anything they want! Also, I suggest it's people's own fault for storing their bitcoins at a place that does not give access to their own private keys. This fork has been a long time coming. Everyone and their mother was warned to keep your own bitcoins in your own privately controlled wallet (entirely offline if possible) to weather this fork. Anyone who cries that Coinbase didn't do whatever is being childish and deserves it.
- fosap 9y ago
  >Coinbase can do anything they want! That's no how laws work. Not even remotely. Thankfully. Consider you order somebody (X) to transport your pregnant cow. At the destination the cow arrives. It's not pregnant anymore and X refuses to give you the calf because... well, because he can do anything he wants. That's theft.
  - jmilloy 9y ago
    It's more like, while transporting the pregnant cows, one bird jumped on each cow in the trailer along the way, and now you're demanding X gives you not just the cows, but the birds, too, even though they're hard to catch.
    - fosap 9y ago
      No, is not like that. Both the calf to the cow and bch (bcc ?) to btc are "intrinsic". They are the result of the nature of these things. Not gifts, not accidents, not abritrary. And coinbase keeps the bch (as they announced), so the bird analogy does not fit at all.
    - djKianoosh 9y ago
      Are these African or European swallows?
  - barkingcat 9y ago
orbitingpluto 9y ago
Betting that this headline would be here today would have been a smarter investment than, well, anything really.
jmilloy 9y ago
I don't really follow these cryptocurrencies very closely. I assume that Coinbase is sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin belonging to their customers, which would mean that they are now also sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin Cash. So could Coinbase short (some of) that Bitcoin Cash by selling it on other exchanges? I read this statement from Coinbase: "If this decision were to change in the future and Coinbase was to access Bitcoin Cash, we would distribute Bitcoin Cash to customers associated with Bitcoin balances at the time of the fork." So as long as Coinbase bought back enough Bitcoin Cash to distribute it to customers at time-of-fork-value, they would be true to their word. Or is there something that prevents Coinbase from even accessing the Bitcoin Cash associated with Bitcoin it is holding? Edit: I'm not trying to make any judgments here, I don't know enough. Just trying to understand.
- shpongled 9y ago
  Yes, Coinbase would control the private keys for any bitcoin stored there. So the issue is most likely that Coinbase hold's the majority of it's digital currencies in cold storage - essentially stored on air-gapped computers. To redeem your bitcoin cash (BCH), you have to import your private keys into a new bitcoin cash wallet, and then transfer them. If you do not transfer your BTC to a new wallet before importing your private keys to the BCH wallet, a malicious wallet could then have access to both your BCH and BTC. With replay protection, the solution is to move your BTC to a new wallet, then import the old private keys (with a balance of 0 BTC, but still has BCH associated) to the BCH wallet. Hopefully you can see all of the failure points here. I have coins stored in cold storage and haven't yet bothered to claim any BCH due to the hassle, and lack of exchanges where you can sell it.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  You're more or less correct. Coinbase is sitting on the keys to customer wallets/funds. When the fork happened, those keys work both on the original Bitcoin network and the new "Bitcoin Cash" network. Which, apparently turned out to have substantial value (currently trading ~$650). Coinbase made a colossal mistake in outright ignoring BCC and will likely get sued (and lose) because of it. If I had 10 BTC on CB and missed out on the opportunity to trade or sell $6,500 worth of free BCC I just got, I'd be mad too. They need to act quickly before it goes to court. Someone else commented that they don't even need to support trading BCC, all they have to do is provide a way for customers to withdraw their BCC, and they're in the clear.
gauravhp 9y ago
Can someone please advice me whether its good to invest now or wait for sometime for it to settle?
- shpongled 9y ago
  None of us can see the future. I first got into bitcoin in early 2011. I have no rational evidence to support this, but my intuition tells me that bitcoin cash will not be the winner. Too much hassle to adopt, few exchanges currently supporting it.
  - gauravhp 9y ago
    Thanks for the response!
  - zeep 9y ago
    but BCH/BCC is more like BTC was designed to be (everything is in the blockchain)... What is the hassle? more HDD space used up?
    - oscilloscope 9y ago
      Most exchanges, wallets, miners, etc currently support BTC and designate it as the new Bitcoin. The switching costs are the big hassle.
ty_a 9y ago
75% of the hashrate was just advertrolling. Which had the side effect of keeping the difficulty high. They should have forked Bitcoin and used a different PoW... Oh wait that's Litecoin. https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they-mined-most-of-the-bitcoin-cash-blocks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they...
- uncoder0 9y ago
  LTC isn't a fork of the BTC chain but a fork of the BTC software BCH is a fork of both.
mikeash 9y ago
For all the people saying this is totally fine and they warned people and they shouldn't have to support every single fork that comes along, I'd like to pose a hypothetical. All forks are basically equivalent. If I fork Bitcoin today, my fork is just as legitimate as Segwit or Bitcoin Cash. The only differentiation is community buy-in and hashing power and similar fuzzy metrics. Rather than sticking with Segwit and ignoring BCC, what if Coinbase had ignored Segwit and stuck with BCC? People would have lost 75% of their holdings, as measured in USD. Would you consider that to be OK? Or worse, imagine if Coinbase created their own fork and starting from some certain date they only supported that fork, and it ended up being worthless because nobody cared about it. Coinbase would have basically wiped out all of their users. Would that be OK?
- tedunangst 9y ago
  Also, what happens with future forks? There's a 60/40 split to start. Ok, fine, drop the 40, keep the 60. Then that splits a while later, 55/45. Now your 55% of 60% stake is less than 40% of the original.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I don't follow Bitcoin other than on HN, but it seems to me that while they may both be legitimate, but they're still distinguishable, right? They may share the chain history, but only one of them produces blocks supported by pre-fork clients, right? The situation doesn't seem analogous to me.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I think it depends on how you do the fork. You can make a fork that generates blocks that the original clients can't validate, or you can make a fork whose blocks on the original chain, and are ignored just because they're not the tallest. If you somehow got a majority of the mining power on your side in that scenario, you'd supplant the "original."
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Best case scenario is they handle it the same way they handled ETH/ETC fork.
kerkeslager 9y ago
The problem both sides are trying to solve is that the system as a whole cannot handle the volume of transactions. Before the split, bitcoin handled 7 transactions per second, while Visa handles 50,000 transactions per second (I'm worrying these numbers from memory, so they might be wildly inaccurate). Bitcoin Cash solves this with a larger block size. This is admittedly a short-term solution. Bitcoin main, on the other hand, is moving toward SegWit, which introduces third-party middlemen. Service providers like Coinbase want this, because they get to be the middlemen. But critically, SegWit breaks the only long-term advantage Bitcoin currently has over Visa. SegWit isn't decentralized. Bitcoin with SegWit still isn't as fast as Visa, so if you don't need decentralization then you should just use Visa. The only people who benefit from bitcoin with SegWit are the middlemen. Decentralization is bitcoin's core value proposition. If you give that up to solve the scaling problem, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know the long term solution to bitcoin's scaling problem, but I do know that I'm not interested in a centralized cryptocurrency.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  The important distinction with SegWit is that you can always go "on blockchain" to keep a transaction really private if it needs to be. Liquidity + optional complete anonymity + scalability. Plus I think there will be ways of getting SegWit to be more anon over time. Bitcoin cash's solution will not scale. It's probably going to fail. [90% confidence.]
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Sure, if you're willing to pay on-blockchain fees, which are only going up given a constant block size. Neither option provides anonymity, so that's fairly irrelevant to this conversation. SegWit claims of future anonymity may come true, but given it's antithetical to a centralized business model, I wouldn't hold my breath.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  The important distinction with SegWit is that you can always go "on blockchain" to keep a transaction really private if it needs to be. Liquidity + optional complete anonymity + scalability. Plus I think there will be ways of getting SegWit to be more anon over time. Bitcoin cash's solution will not scale. It's probably going to fail. [90% confidence.]
m-p-3 9y ago
To be fair, as long as you do not have the private key to your wallet, you do not have complete control. Whoever kept their bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet and wanted to use Bitcoin Cash, it was their responsibility to move them to a wallet they fully control in advance to the fork.
- SnowProblem 9y ago
  Coinbase put limits on how much BTC could be transferred out each day, and didn't respond to support requests to increase the limits.
runeks 9y ago
This seems fishy to me. There’s a huge divergence in the price between the various exchanges that claim to trade BCH[1], signaling that arbitrageurs are unable to deposit to/withdraw from the exchanges. Many exchanges aren’t even allowing BCH deposits, meaning that the price isn’t connected to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, since you can’t sell these coins into the market. Right now there seems to exist multiple different BCH — one for each exchange — all of them with a different price because they’re not joined by the coins on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
Taek 9y ago
Soars to $700 because nobody who owns any is able to sell them. Trading is not open to the public except on one exchange right now, and while that exchange is holding a comfortable $350, it's also an unpopular and low-volume exchange - I'm guessing 90% of their users today made accounts today just to sell their Bitcoin Cash. I know I did. Once Kraken, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and the other major BCH supporting exchanges are actually accepting deposits, I imagine we'll see the price take a nosedive.
Animats 9y ago
Coinbase will either cave in on this or be sued and lose. Especially since they're sluggish about large withdrawals. The real risk for Coinbase comes if they don't have 100% of the Bitcoins on deposit. If they don't have all those Bitcoins, like Mt. Gox, we're going to find out.
- thefalcon 9y ago
  I can't imagine they'll continue to ignore the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Also it would be crazy for them to have encouraged their users to withdraw BTC prior to the fork if they were insolvent. I imagine it will all work out, though Coinbase loses lots of reputation points from me for by insisting on being so slow and reactionary instead of proactive like several other exchanges.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    It won't be that large for long. Only reason why it's so high is the few places you can sell it aren't accepting BCH deposits; the only way you can sell is if you had BTC there prior to August 1. There's a ton of pent up demand to sell; once those exchanges allow deposits, there will be a ton of dumping and the price will fall substantially.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Animats 9y ago
      That makes it worse for Coinbase. They could be held liable for losses incurred because people couldn't access their BCH to sell at the top. This is the sort of thing which may involve Coinbase in litigation over whether SEC and CFTC rules on "fails to deliver" apply to them. When a real broker does something like this, they're on the hook for customer losses.
      - bdcravens 9y ago
        No, they won't. You can't deposit into those exchanges yet, so if those Coinbasers had those BCH in hand, ready to sell, they wouldn't be able to anyways. In other words, if you didn't have BTC on those exchanges prior to August 1, BCH is an unsaleable asset, so that price is not relevant.
granaldo 9y ago
Its at $750 now https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd Crazy that it was trading at $1200 BTC all-time high 3 years ago
- thefalcon 9y ago
  The latter part of this comment seems to confuse BCC/BCH with BTC.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Careful, there are huge discrepancies between exchanges, due to the illiquidity and difficulty in creating transactions at this time. Here is a list of exchanges that seem to be listing Bitcoin Cash (along with their prices): https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
bdcravens 9y ago
Coinbase will likely allow users to withdraw their BCH, but not exchange it, so they'll have to go elsewhere. They did the exact same thing with Ethereum Classic (after the price dropped like 80% from the initial spike, no less), and they ended support for those withdrawals at the end of 2016. To handle this fork differently could invite another lawsuit.
blhack 9y ago
Just to clarify: bitcoin cash (BCH) is only sortof worth $700. There aren't any mainstream exchanges accepting BCH deposits right now, so the market for BCH is limited mostly to people on kraken trading BCH with one another there only. The exchanges that are accepting BCH require 20 confirmations on your BCH deposit before they let you withdraw the BTC/XBT you traded them for. 20 confirmations right now would take multiple days. The exchanges offering this also seem to have pretty lax identity requirements, which is not a great sign.
- jaycroft 9y ago
  Further, as of this writing, more than 24 hours after the first forked block was mined, we still don't even have those 20 confirmations!
lorenzfx 9y ago
If the only difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is that bitcoin cash has larger block sizes (true?), why does bitcoin cash not go "back" to the bitcoin blockchain since it is now much longer and should also be a valid bitcoin cash blockchain?
- cesarb 9y ago
  Bitcoin Cash also has a rule that a specific block (the first one after a specific date and time) MUST be larger than 1 megabyte. If that specific block is smaller, it's not a valid Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Since that specific block is smaller than 1 megabyte in the main Bitcoin blockchain (because the maximum block size for Bitcoin is 1 megabyte), the current Bitcoin blockchain is not a valid Bitcoin Cash blockchain.
bdcravens 9y ago
Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled trading it (which they didn't with ETC when ETH forked), all those Coinbasers wouldn't be able to sell anyways. They'd be waiting like everyone else, so that $700 price wouldn't matter.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Regardless of the price, an exchange cannot seize customer assets by giving them 10 days notice for withdrawal. It doesn't matter if it's a separate currency - we have things resembling this in public markets, like stock splits. It doesn't matter if everyone can fork the cryptocurrency, that doesn't change the principle of a customer's asset. What Coinbase should have done is this: 1. Stood their ground on not supporting trading for the cryptocurrency, because they are under no obligation to develop new features. 2. Implemented a system to disburse the forked currency to customers if needed. 3. Implemented an explicit trigger price for acknowledging the new currency, which would function for potential forks of currencies already supported on the platform. If the currency does not pass a specific (very low, far lower than $700) mark, they don't disburse it, but if it does, they immediately support disbursal to anyone who requests it. The organic state of a cryptocurrency fork is that all extant holders receive a new asset, which may or may not be worth anything. A company cannot seize that asset without consideration. If the price of the currency subsequently crashes, then it crashes; that does not change the rights of a customer to their assets, which cannot be signed away with an email sent out 10 days before the event.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Regardless of the price, an exchange cannot seize customer assets by giving them 10 days notice for withdrawal. Perhaps, but the legal question is whether a protocol fork as a matter of law creates a new asset owned by the customer, creates a new asset owned by whoever controls the wallet keys, or merely creates an opportunity which someone who controls wallet keys may exploit to generate a new asset by participating in the ecosystem on the new side of the fork. (Fundamentally, this also lays near the question of legal ownership of Bitcoin or similar cryptocurrency in general and what specifically is “owned” when one owns them.)
blhack 9y ago
Coinbase is in a bad situation here. If they set a precedent that all BTC forks will be available to their users, then they open themselves to some pretty obvious DOS attacks. 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd. I think it's pretty obvious that they're going to just issue the BCH to people eventually. Here's another thought experiment: I am a now-extremely-wealthy bitcoin early adopter, and I am so happy at bitcoin's success that I am going to distribute $100 of USD cash per bitcoin to every person who can show me that they own a bitcoin. To claim your $100, send me a Self-addressed-stamped-envelope proving your bitcoin ownership, and I will mail you back the cash. Does coinbase have an obligation to send a bunch of SASEs to me? Are the coinbase customer's "owed" that $100? I personally don't think so. I think that's the tradeoff you're making by having coinbase securely store your coins for you.
- celticninja 9y ago
  It would require enough mining power to keep the chains alive, this is probably the only chance of keeping a fork of bitcoin alive, and even this is tenuous. Bitcoin Cash has a large support base however very little of that seems to be in the form of miners and you can have all the supporters and users in the world, but if you have no miners then you have no network. Given that they will use the same technology and have the same size block reward it doesn't seem to make sense to mine the currency that is worth less. When difficulty adjusts downwards you may get more block rewards initially but unless the coins hit parity there will always be a benefit in mining the more valuable coin.
  - rjbwork 9y ago
    It also doesn't make sense to mine a currency that has no users...or people taking it as payment. If there is a user base, miners will materialize.
- hendzen 9y ago
  Yes we expect Coinbase to support them all. Public companies have complicated stock actions like spinoffs (i.e. "Forking" the company), rights offerings, scrip offerings, stock dividends, etc. Do you think ETrade gets to not give their users the results of such actions because it would be complex to implement?
2paisay 9y ago
I thought it was supposed to be a decenteralized peer to peer utopia. Now it all depends on Coinbase's whims.
- danielharrison 9y ago
  Bitcoin does not equal coinbase. Two completely different things.
eadmund 9y ago
Without JavaScript, the article is a blank page, containing merely 'SEARCH' and '10:18 AM ET'. What's it say?
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I wonder sometimes if the origin of coinage was similarly fraught with these sorts of challenges. The history of money exhibit at the British Museum is pretty awesome and they go over some of the 'coin scams' of the day like nicking bits off the coins and remelting them into new coins, melting coins and alloying them with other metals so that they 'felt right' but were diluted. People who no longer had to be 'landed' could steal enough coins and be 'rich'. Etc. So back in that time when a new coin came out, I'm sure the money changers would spend good long time watching it to see how it was abused before they started accepting it as a 'real' coin. Seems like much the same is true for blockchain currencies, they all need a bit of 'bake time' before you really understand both the demand and the risks associated with them.
- duderific 9y ago
  Heck, you can see this in US coinage today. A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid. The cost of the metal gets to a point where it doesn't make sense to use it in the currency anymore. For example, if the metal in a quarter was worth more than $.25, you could simply melt it down and sell it for more than the face value (assuming the cost of melting etc. could be brought down at volume).
  - 0xffff2 9y ago
    > A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid. I felt the same, but as far as I can tell the current quarter composition weighs 84% as much as the heaviest quarter ever produced and 90% as much as any quarter made since 1873. The quarter's composition has only changed three times in the history of the United States.
    - csours 9y ago
      You were also smaller when you were younger...
    - Frondo 9y ago
      I can think of another reason why a handheld object would seem bigger and heavier when you're young and small, as opposed to when you're old and big...
vetrom 9y ago
So you needed to get 'your' BTC into a real wallet (and not an exchange) to be able to have pre-fork BTC that would act as BCH. While similar to both currency and commodity, this is one of the situations where cryptocurrency acts as more of a fungible contract than either the currency or commodity. IANAL, but it seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of law written on that. I'd argue that Coinbase expended its fiduciary duty by warning their users of the fork. Coinbase/kraken/et al., however, don't create/issue the cryptocoins, so it's probably a misnomer to call them exchanges. At best, they are brokerages. Now say that a bunch of users decided to instruct their broker that's holding their security in trust to so assign the security to the user, and the brokerage sat on that transaction rather than perform the request in a timely fashion? I'd say that potentially counts as a whole host of other actionable events, depending on the intent of the brokerage operators. Not sure if I'd call that front running, but that sounds like a good start to investigate.
- davesque 9y ago
  > I'd argue that Coinbase expended its fiduciary duty by warning their users of the fork. But people are arguing, and I think convincingly, that Coinbase didn't provide enough lead time after sending out the email announcing their decision. Coinbase also essentially gets to pocket all the extra value which should reasonably have belonged to their customers. IANAL either, but I have to imagine there are the beginnings of something like an unjust enrichment claim here.
IanDrake 9y ago
This experiment in crypto currency has made me see the value in fiat money, which is probably the opposite of the desired effect. At the end of they day, these digital monetary schemes have become less of a currency and more of a commodity. Can someone explain to me why I should be less jaded about crypto currencies?
lawn 9y ago
Note that Bitstamp, another large exchange, took a similar stance as Coinbase and has issued an update stating customers will receive their BHC balance: https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/ https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/ For those of our customers who chose to leave their BTC on our platform at the time of the fork, we recorded their BCH balances for the timestamp of the last common block (block 478558), which is 1 August 2017, 13:16:14 UTC. These BCH balances will be made available to our customers as soon as it is safe to do so. If and when the Bitcoin Cash system has been thoroughly tested and is sufficiently stable, we will then consider listing BCH. However, a series of technical, safety and regulatory requirements need to be met in order for this to occur, and it is still too early in the day to make realistic predictions about the timeframes involved.
GoodInvestor 9y ago
Not sure why there's so much hype. Of course the price is going to be up, there's not enough BCH to be traded so naturally the demand will cause the price to go up temporarily.
tobltobs 9y ago
Isn't this screaming for lawsuits in this thread driving the idea of an currency independent of any central authority ad absurdum?
Teknoman117 9y ago
I thought that with Coinbase you really didn't "own" the coins. As in, if you bought a bitcoin via Coinbase you really didn't hold a bitcoin, you really just held a promise that Coinbase would give you a bitcoin at a later date. If that were the case, would they actually be liable for giving you anything related to bitcoin forks? It's also not like they didn't give warning ahead of time either. If you really wanted to use BCC/BCH (whatever gets decided on) you could've just moved the funds out of Coinbase into an offline wallet and sent them back post fork.

317 points by abhi3 9y ago

Meanwhile, it's 12 hours since Bitcoin Cash actually mined a block. The only reason the price is so high is because people can't make transactions to send their BCH to exchanges. EDIT: My mistake. Originally said 20 hours. It's only 12.

sharemywin 9y ago
how is the price established?
- sharemywin 9y ago
  answered my own question: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets some exchanges support it.
Jenya_ 9y ago
The delay in mining was required to trigger drastic difficulty reduction (20%). More details at https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adjustment_triggered_at_0940_utc/dl24nbj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adju...
- matthewbauer 9y ago
  I'm confused. You're saying that the delay was intentional?
  - TD-Linux 9y ago
    It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjust...
    - matthewbauer 9y ago
      Okay that sounds more reasonable. My original thought was that it's not very decentralized if all the miners can agree to stop mining at any point. Economic reasons seem much more reasonable.
      - cesarb 9y ago
        It's not very decentralized. According to https://cash.coin.dance/blocks https://cash.coin.dance/blocks ten of the 16 blocks so far on this fork have been mined by "Genesis Block 269-273 Hennessy Road Wan Chai Hong Kong", 3 have been mined by ViaBTC, and only 3 by someone else. These two pools together have around 80% of the hash rate on this fork.
DoctorBit 9y ago
Less than 12 hours.
- jstanley 9y ago
  My bad, thanks. I was looking at median time instead of timestamp.
RichardHeart 9y ago
Block monitors for BitcoinCash https://cash.coin.dance/ https://cash.coin.dance/ https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/ http://blockdozer.com/insight/
discombobulate 9y ago
The popular press are crypto-illiterate.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
makomk 9y ago
Even if they could make transactions, the exchanges aren't accepting deposits of BCH. The only exception I'm aware of is ViaBTC and apparently they want 20 confirmations (about a week at current hashrate, I think). The BCH market cap that's quoted in this article is rather misleading because nearly all of those coins simply cannot be sold on exchanges currently. Regarding the question in the replies: when the fork happened, all the BTC in the exchanges at the time split off into an equal amount of BCH. The various BCH/BTC markets are effectively trading people's claims to portions of those much smaller pools of BCH that were already on the exchange when it forked. (Those claims can't necessarily be converted into actual BCH yet either; for example, Kraken isn't currently allowing BCH withdrawals.)
- runeks 9y ago
  Wait a minute, what? How can Kraken claim to have a BCH/BTC market if you can’t deposit BCH and sell them?
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    For BTC they already hold pre-fork.
  - TD-Linux 9y ago
    They are just trading their internal accounting of BCH, by crediting BTC holders with BCH. Nothing is hitting the blockchain. Bitfinex did this too, but royally screwed up: http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-accounting-disaster/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-a...
reefoctopus 9y ago
This also conveniently prevents people from dumping BCH to drive down the price. The number of confirmations required by most exchanges in order to guard against double spending Sybil attacks will take days. The price will continue to rise as it makes its way into the news. By the time people can dump their BCH it is likely there will be substantial momentum behind it. The launch has been brilliantly orchestrated.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  But the amount of existing BCH is so high, that the moment it starts reaching the exchanges the dump will be earth-shattering. If only there was a way to short BCH... :(
  - aero142 9y ago
    A short is just a loan and a contract. If you can find your own counterparty, you might be able to do it.
    - danmaz74 9y ago
      I thought about this, but who would make a loan to somebody they don't know without a platform with sufficient guarantees? And anyway, it would need to be BCH which is already on one of the few exchanges that allow to trade it, as it's impossible for the time being to move it around (which is the very reason why the price is high there right now). Not very likely. On the other hand, if anybody who is long on BCH wanted to talk about a future or an option, I'm all ears :D
      - jdmichal 9y ago
        Sufficient guarantees are just a contract. The result is the same either way if something goes wrong -- you take the counterparty to court.
        danmaz74 9y ago
mrb 9y ago
2 blocks were mined right after you posted on HN: Block 478571 on Aug 2, 2017 16:20:19 AM UTC (4.7MB! since it holds ~12 hours worth of transactions) Block 478572 on Aug 2, 2017 16:36:31 AM UTC http://blockdozer.com/insight/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/blocks

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Coinbase has clearly stated the company is not taking customers' Bitcoin Cash for themselves So effectively, it's as if they just burned all of the Bitcoin Cash they were holding?

ukd1 9y ago
no - they're just not doing anything with it.
- polotics 9y ago
  Where have they explicitly contractually commited to this?
- jpmattia 9y ago
  > no - they're just not doing anything with it. "We're not taking it, we're just not giving it to you."
eximius 9y ago
Not unless they deleted the keys holding the original, which would be unutterably stupid. They just havent credited their customers. They could do so at any time.
- icebraining 9y ago
  They can't delete the keys without also losing the BTCs. They could transfer the BCC to non-existent addresses, though.
imaginenore 9y ago
They still have the control over their clients' BCH, just not moving it. They didn't burn anything.
jncraton 9y ago
They are most certainly still holding them. They would actually have to take intentional steps to burn them, and that would be silly to do as they'd literally be throwing away money. It seems that there is an assumption from Coinbase that BCC will be nearly worthless, so it isn't worth building the infra to handle both currencies. They can choose to make users BCC available if there is enough demand for it. Here's what Coinbase themselves say about this: > Coinbase does not intend to interact with the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, or to access bitcoin cash (BCC). In order to safely and securely access bitcoin cash, Coinbase would need to undertake a process of designing and testing significant changes to our systems — including hot and cold storage. This is one of the core reasons customers will not be able to withdraw bitcoin cash after the fork on August 1st, 2017. > If this decision were to change in the future and we were to access bitcoin cash, we would distribute to customers bitcoin cash (BCC) associated with bitcoin (BTC) balances at the time of the fork on August 1st, 2017. Coinbase would not keep the bitcoin cash associated with customer bitcoin (BTC) balances for ourselves.

JohnTHaller 9y ago

They had the opportunity to move their funds and plenty of notice.

Klathmon 9y ago
And Coinbase was pretty good about getting pretty much all of the massive exodus of coins out of their system and out of cold storage in time. And they were pretty explicit that they wouldn't be supporting the BCC chain. I get it people are upset about possibly missing out on money, but Coinbase handled this about as good as they could.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  I mean, I was able get mine from Coinbase 3 hours before their deadline, and it only took a few minutes for it to pop up, and another 20 minutes to get the confirmations. I was considering just leaving them on there, but decided against it at the last minute, so I'm glad the '12 hour delays for Coinbase withdrawals' wasn't true. I do regret not informing others I know about the fork, though. They most likely still have their coins on Coinbase.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  No they didn't. They could have offered withdrawals of BCC, eliminating all uncertainty. That would be handling it "best". Or even a clear policy as to under which circumstances they will offer BCC would be better. (If they said they'd do withdrawals if the price stays over 0.1BTC, that'd have placated a lot of people.) Giving notice so as to not totally screw customers is sort of the least they could do. How they get any sort of praise for this is bizarre.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Even the exhanges that support just about every currency out there still don't allow deposits/withdraws of BCC right now. There really is a lot of uncertainty around this whole situation, and due to the nature of a split a mistake in one of the coins can cause the user to lose both of them. It's not an area that I want my services rushing into and making mistakes. If I were in Coinbase's position, I'd make sure that I'm doing everything to fully support and secure the currencies that I officially support, and maybe support some forks later if there is massive demand or there are more stable/secure methods of handling it. I mean right now the biggest "wallets" for BCC are rushed, filled with bugs, and have significant issues in some areas. If they had said "we will allow you to withdraw BCC" and they didn't allow it right away, people would be significantly more upset (rightfully so in my opinion). At least the way they handled it they clearly and publicly announced that if you wanted to deal with BCC, you should move your funds out of Coinbase, and they gave multiple notifications over multiple days about this. And mind you, they did offer a clear explanation of when they will offer BCC, They won't. That's about as clear as you can get. They might change that in the future, but you can't say they didn't warn you if they never do.

hardwaresofton 9y ago

Does anyone know any exchanges that are selling BCC/BCH?

sterban 9y ago
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
neals 9y ago
I found myself having my BTC assets copied to BCH on kraken.com, which I think is the best thing ever.
- makomk 9y ago
  Having your BTC on the exchange split into BCH the time of the fork is the only way I'm aware of to get your BCH onto Kraken (or the other exchanges) because they're not currently accepting BCH deposits. Unless it's already on an exchange that supports it or you've got a time machine you're basically out of luck for now if you want to sell your BCH, and even then people have been having problems with the exchanges falling over.

IgorPartola 9y ago

Sorry but what exactly is Bitcoin Cash? It seems like it's a fork in the BTC blockchain, but what prompted it and what gives it any sort of value, let alone a $12*10^9? Is it somehow technically superior? Is the move going to be to have BTC and BTC Cash exist side by side? Or are they going to fight for the market?

MichaelGG 9y ago
You can read up on it all over. But the short answer is Bitcoin Cash forked Bitcoin and has 8MB blocks, which would have eliminated congestion and lowered fees on Bitcoin during the past year. Both sides (small Vs big) have economic incentives behind them, making the argument extra vitriolic. But larger blocks allow on chain growth, keeping it peer to peer without requiring any 3rd parties. (And the answer that 8x more bandwidth and storage makes it infeasible for enough people to run nodes rings false.)
- yebyen 9y ago
  It doesn't make anything infeasible today. But if you think both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are going to be around in 20 years, and you want to support both, now you've just added 800% to your annual storage growth rate. (Assuming that BCC always mines full blocks, which I will admit seems unlikely) I have to be honest, I was keeping a cold wallet with some ~1-2 BTC in it until the price reached record high territory in the last few months, and it took me several days to download the entire blockchain against my wallet.dat. I had to free up well over 100GB to get the coins out. If I hadn't done this dozens of times already (when the blockchain was smaller) and had some degree of confidence that it was going to succeed and grant me access to the coins, I probably would have been freaking out as I reached about the 36 hour mark into the process. I can't imagine it's going to get better in the next couple of years. Maybe "Moore's law for storage" will outpace economic growth in the Cryptocurrency sector, and in 20 years my mobile phone will be so powerful that it will no longer be a concern. That sounds like a bit of a gamble, doesn't it?
  - PretzelPirate 9y ago

gtirloni 9y ago

Coinbase did the right thing by warning their users beforehand that they wouldn't work with BCH. They could have simply ignored it altogether and continue business as usual like nothing had ever happened. Now after the fork, if people want to convert BTC to BCH, they have to go through a intermediary currency, just like many banks won't convert USD to $unknown_currency sometimes. It doesn't surprise me there are talks about lawsuits, cryptocurrencies will have a hard time shaking off all the speculators and scammers.

conanbatt 9y ago
Sure, 4 days before the fork and also locking up withdrawals and setting time limits. I could accept Coinbase saying they dont plan on supporting it in the long term, but its kind of ridiculous to think that Coinbase can make a blogpost, and potentially appropiate millions of dollars of the coinbase users and thats fine because it was said before. Not to mention that I've been particularly locked out of the platform for months due to the slow and fuzzy account recovery process, and that the delays on it didnt allow me to retreive the coins in time between the notice, the lockup and the account recovery process time. So no, I dont find Coinbase's position at all tenable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bitJericho 9y ago
  Perhaps you would like to switch to my exchange? http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com
  - kgwgk 9y ago
    Bitcoin sex change? Are you affiliated with expert sex change?
  - smlsugarlumps 9y ago
    I don't trust a site named bitcoin sex change

vgprice 9y ago

But seriously, people threaten to sue the exchanges everytime they go down from insane amounts of traffic during a dip or spike.

gtrubetskoy 9y ago

What I think all the press isn't making very clear is that to the best of my understanding for every Bitcoin you own, you get a Bitcoin Cash coin. There is no "conversion", it is free money for all BTC holders. Everyone who owned BTC, now owns BTC+BCC. Of course if your BTC is not real, but is held by an exchange such as Coinbase, how you get your BCC isn't at all clear.

jncraton 9y ago
> Of course if your BTC is not real, but is held by an exchange such as Coinbase, how you get your BCC isn't at all clear. Your BTC should still be "real", but the exchange holds the keys instead of you. Your point stands about it being unclear how you would access your BCC. If you aren't allowed access to your BCC, there's nothing preventing exchanges from dumping the BCC for cash as far as I can tell from a purely technical standpoint (IANAL).
- simias 9y ago
  What if the exchange didn't actually hold the BTC but only had a line in the database with an "IOU xBTC"? Maybe at this point the exchange had used its stored BTC to speculate on an other market and attempt to increase its profets. Maybe they bought Ether or gold or Microsoft stock. Normally it doesn't matter as long as the exchange is capable of sending you back the coins when you claim them but in case of a fork they'd have to buy two coins instead.
  - jncraton 9y ago
    That's certainly a possibility. I was working from the assumption that Coinbase actually held BTC totaling the sum of all users account balances. Given the highly volatile nature of BTC and the nature of the BTC community (e.g. the conventional wisdom was to pull all funds from exchanges prior to the fork occurring), it seems quite irresponsible to not be holding funds as BTC. I'm aware that exchanges in the past have behaved very irresponsibly, but I'm hoping that Coinbase is the exception here as a well known US-based company.
- 9y ago

galfarragem 9y ago

People who bought BTC on Coinbase/Gdax after the fork own the correspondent BCC also?

jncraton 9y ago
That shouldn't be the case. BTC purchased after the fork has no relationship to BCC. Bitcoin transactions included before block 478559 are both valid BTC and BCC transactions. Anything after that is only valid as one or the other depending on which chain it is included in.
npongratz 9y ago
After the fork, BTC and BCH are distinct and independent. So buying BTC after the fork would gives the buyer zero BCH.
- galfarragem 9y ago
  So who owns the correspondent BCH (assuming that the seller was a coinbase user before the fork)? Coinbase? The previous owner?
  - pat2man 9y ago
    Coinbase has the keys for them, they have stated that if they ever accessed those coins they would make them available to the wallet holders.

brianberns 9y ago

As an outsider, the remarkable thing about this to me is that one can (for now) sell the same bitcoins twice, right? If I own 1 bitcoin pre-fork, I can sell it for $2700 and then sell the exact same bitcoin again as Bitcoin Cash for $700. Crazy.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jbb67 9y ago
Well, you could if there was any practical way to sell the bitcoin cash version at the moment. I personally think it likely that once you can, you'll be lucky to get $7 for one.
- brianberns 9y ago
  If there's no practical way to sell bitcoin cash, where does the $700 valuation come from?
  - undersuit 9y ago
    Demand to trade them, but it could all come crashing down like an overpriced IPO.
  - abhi3 9y ago
    In theory, it could be that currently the demand is way higher than the supply, if everyone were able to sell their BCC then the price could crash (assuming everyone would want to sell them as soon as they are able)
  - makomk 9y ago
    The handful of smaller exchanges that support Bitcoin Cash gave everyone who had Bitcoins on their exchanges at the time of the fork an equal balance in Bitcoin Cash, and it's that relatively small amount of on-exchange BCH that people have been trading. (I think one exchange allowed trading before the fork even happened, and just required people to have both BCH and BTC in order to make withdrawals before the fork.) Actual on-chain Bitcoin Cash cannot be sold right now as it can't be deposited in any of the exchanges, and buying it is iffy too due to some of them not allowing withdrawals either. The price of Bittrex BCH has also generally been about 40-50% higher than BCH on the other exchanges for some reason.

bdonlan 9y ago

It's an interesting situation, but assigning liability to coinbase for this seems like it'd be a problem long term. Unlike traditional securities, there's nothing stopping me from going out and making my own fork tomorrow - and then would all exchanges be required to add support for that fork, too? Where do you draw the line?

btzll 9y ago
This is not a random fork. This is a fork with almost $400 million 24 hour volume. Coinbase should allow users to withdraw their BCC, since they are sitting on a huge pile of BCC units, which belong to customers.
- abhi3 9y ago
  And if the price of BCC were to crash to single digit USD in a week it takes for Coinbase to come to a decision then the customers would have lost a fortune.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    They already came to a decision. They told people who wanted BCC to withdraw their coins before August 1st. Everyone who wanted BCC already has them.
    - lawn 9y ago
      ... Giving a few days to do it. Ignoring withdrawal limits the customers cannot raise.
      - Alex3917 9y ago
        Customers could have sold their BTC for USD at any time and just held USD until after the fork. There isn't any functional difference between holding USD pre-fork or holding both BTC and BCH post-fork.

mxscho 9y ago

Some already mentioned this list showing some exchanges that currently offer the ability to trade BCH assets for BTC or fiat currency. [1] Note however that due to low count of blocks currently being mined for BCH there is no chance for the exchanges to get enough confirmations for deposited BCH from any (private, non-exchange) wallet to safely confirm the deposit. So the only BCH assets that are currently being sold are probably the ones that were granted by the exchanges to the people that did not bother to transfer their BTC credit into their self-controlled wallet previous to the fork. I think this is also a reason why BTC assets seem to be a bit overvalued right now. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

pera 9y ago

From the class-action lawsuit website "FAQ": > Coinbase allowed users to withdraw BTC prior to the hard fork > The process of transferring Bitcoin can be complex and potentially very risky even for experienced users. Additionally, creation of a new account or wallet on a different exchange is often a lengthy and difficult process. While Coinbase did suggest to users that they could move their BTC to a different wallet in order to obtain BCH, the procedure can be seen as prohibitive by a significant portion of users. Finally, many users reported slow or non-responsive site when trying to move their BTC from Coinbase prior to the lock-down that preceded the hard fork. First, transferring founds from one wallet to another is trivial in Bitcoin, and in fact it is easier than any other money transfer method that I know of. Second, if it really was that difficult then why they are, at the same time, accepting donations using Bitcoin and Ethereum on the same website?. Third, "Bitcoin Cash" is an altcoin, and anyone can create a similar fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, should Coinbase support them all?? because that would be ridiculous. I can not believe these people are serious...

bradly 9y ago
I had to move my coins out of Coinbase last week and it was very scary. I had never moved coins before and I even though the process seems simple, I had very little confidence in what I was doing. Honestly, I almost just left the coins in Coinbase figuring losing 10% of value from BCH is still probably positive equity compared to my perceived risk of losing it all which felt between 25% and 50%.
- pera 9y ago
  What was the very scary part? you just need to copy and paste a Bitcoin address, it literally can not be simpler :) is it maybe the the alphanumeric hash that looks scary?
  - lawn 9y ago
    Handling a potentially large of money and keeping it secure? How to store the key? What happens if I loose my phone/computer? How can I protect myself from fire and theft? Which wallet to choose? How can I be certain I don't have a virus waiting to steal my coins? Did i copy my address correctly? That's a lot of uncertainty for "it literally can not be simpler".

barkingcat 9y ago

Haha why is there "fiduciary" duty when Coinbase is not a bank, not a security agency, and not any type of share that people bought into (ie customers are not shareholder). Coinbase can do anything they want! Also, I suggest it's people's own fault for storing their bitcoins at a place that does not give access to their own private keys. This fork has been a long time coming. Everyone and their mother was warned to keep your own bitcoins in your own privately controlled wallet (entirely offline if possible) to weather this fork. Anyone who cries that Coinbase didn't do whatever is being childish and deserves it.

fosap 9y ago
>Coinbase can do anything they want! That's no how laws work. Not even remotely. Thankfully. Consider you order somebody (X) to transport your pregnant cow. At the destination the cow arrives. It's not pregnant anymore and X refuses to give you the calf because... well, because he can do anything he wants. That's theft.
- jmilloy 9y ago
  It's more like, while transporting the pregnant cows, one bird jumped on each cow in the trailer along the way, and now you're demanding X gives you not just the cows, but the birds, too, even though they're hard to catch.
  - fosap 9y ago
    No, is not like that. Both the calf to the cow and bch (bcc ?) to btc are "intrinsic". They are the result of the nature of these things. Not gifts, not accidents, not abritrary. And coinbase keeps the bch (as they announced), so the bird analogy does not fit at all.
  - djKianoosh 9y ago
    Are these African or European swallows?
- barkingcat 9y ago

orbitingpluto 9y ago

Betting that this headline would be here today would have been a smarter investment than, well, anything really.

jmilloy 9y ago

I don't really follow these cryptocurrencies very closely. I assume that Coinbase is sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin belonging to their customers, which would mean that they are now also sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin Cash. So could Coinbase short (some of) that Bitcoin Cash by selling it on other exchanges? I read this statement from Coinbase: "If this decision were to change in the future and Coinbase was to access Bitcoin Cash, we would distribute Bitcoin Cash to customers associated with Bitcoin balances at the time of the fork." So as long as Coinbase bought back enough Bitcoin Cash to distribute it to customers at time-of-fork-value, they would be true to their word. Or is there something that prevents Coinbase from even accessing the Bitcoin Cash associated with Bitcoin it is holding? Edit: I'm not trying to make any judgments here, I don't know enough. Just trying to understand.

shpongled 9y ago
Yes, Coinbase would control the private keys for any bitcoin stored there. So the issue is most likely that Coinbase hold's the majority of it's digital currencies in cold storage - essentially stored on air-gapped computers. To redeem your bitcoin cash (BCH), you have to import your private keys into a new bitcoin cash wallet, and then transfer them. If you do not transfer your BTC to a new wallet before importing your private keys to the BCH wallet, a malicious wallet could then have access to both your BCH and BTC. With replay protection, the solution is to move your BTC to a new wallet, then import the old private keys (with a balance of 0 BTC, but still has BCH associated) to the BCH wallet. Hopefully you can see all of the failure points here. I have coins stored in cold storage and haven't yet bothered to claim any BCH due to the hassle, and lack of exchanges where you can sell it.
vocatus_gate 9y ago
You're more or less correct. Coinbase is sitting on the keys to customer wallets/funds. When the fork happened, those keys work both on the original Bitcoin network and the new "Bitcoin Cash" network. Which, apparently turned out to have substantial value (currently trading ~$650). Coinbase made a colossal mistake in outright ignoring BCC and will likely get sued (and lose) because of it. If I had 10 BTC on CB and missed out on the opportunity to trade or sell $6,500 worth of free BCC I just got, I'd be mad too. They need to act quickly before it goes to court. Someone else commented that they don't even need to support trading BCC, all they have to do is provide a way for customers to withdraw their BCC, and they're in the clear.

gauravhp 9y ago

Can someone please advice me whether its good to invest now or wait for sometime for it to settle?

shpongled 9y ago
None of us can see the future. I first got into bitcoin in early 2011. I have no rational evidence to support this, but my intuition tells me that bitcoin cash will not be the winner. Too much hassle to adopt, few exchanges currently supporting it.
- gauravhp 9y ago
  Thanks for the response!
- zeep 9y ago
  but BCH/BCC is more like BTC was designed to be (everything is in the blockchain)... What is the hassle? more HDD space used up?
  - oscilloscope 9y ago
    Most exchanges, wallets, miners, etc currently support BTC and designate it as the new Bitcoin. The switching costs are the big hassle.

ty_a 9y ago

75% of the hashrate was just advertrolling. Which had the side effect of keeping the difficulty high. They should have forked Bitcoin and used a different PoW... Oh wait that's Litecoin. https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they-mined-most-of-the-bitcoin-cash-blocks/ https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they...

uncoder0 9y ago
LTC isn't a fork of the BTC chain but a fork of the BTC software BCH is a fork of both.

mikeash 9y ago

For all the people saying this is totally fine and they warned people and they shouldn't have to support every single fork that comes along, I'd like to pose a hypothetical. All forks are basically equivalent. If I fork Bitcoin today, my fork is just as legitimate as Segwit or Bitcoin Cash. The only differentiation is community buy-in and hashing power and similar fuzzy metrics. Rather than sticking with Segwit and ignoring BCC, what if Coinbase had ignored Segwit and stuck with BCC? People would have lost 75% of their holdings, as measured in USD. Would you consider that to be OK? Or worse, imagine if Coinbase created their own fork and starting from some certain date they only supported that fork, and it ended up being worthless because nobody cared about it. Coinbase would have basically wiped out all of their users. Would that be OK?

tedunangst 9y ago
Also, what happens with future forks? There's a 60/40 split to start. Ok, fine, drop the 40, keep the 60. Then that splits a while later, 55/45. Now your 55% of 60% stake is less than 40% of the original.
icebraining 9y ago
I don't follow Bitcoin other than on HN, but it seems to me that while they may both be legitimate, but they're still distinguishable, right? They may share the chain history, but only one of them produces blocks supported by pre-fork clients, right? The situation doesn't seem analogous to me.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I think it depends on how you do the fork. You can make a fork that generates blocks that the original clients can't validate, or you can make a fork whose blocks on the original chain, and are ignored just because they're not the tallest. If you somehow got a majority of the mining power on your side in that scenario, you'd supplant the "original."
bdcravens 9y ago
Best case scenario is they handle it the same way they handled ETH/ETC fork.

kerkeslager 9y ago

The problem both sides are trying to solve is that the system as a whole cannot handle the volume of transactions. Before the split, bitcoin handled 7 transactions per second, while Visa handles 50,000 transactions per second (I'm worrying these numbers from memory, so they might be wildly inaccurate). Bitcoin Cash solves this with a larger block size. This is admittedly a short-term solution. Bitcoin main, on the other hand, is moving toward SegWit, which introduces third-party middlemen. Service providers like Coinbase want this, because they get to be the middlemen. But critically, SegWit breaks the only long-term advantage Bitcoin currently has over Visa. SegWit isn't decentralized. Bitcoin with SegWit still isn't as fast as Visa, so if you don't need decentralization then you should just use Visa. The only people who benefit from bitcoin with SegWit are the middlemen. Decentralization is bitcoin's core value proposition. If you give that up to solve the scaling problem, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know the long term solution to bitcoin's scaling problem, but I do know that I'm not interested in a centralized cryptocurrency.

3pt14159 9y ago
The important distinction with SegWit is that you can always go "on blockchain" to keep a transaction really private if it needs to be. Liquidity + optional complete anonymity + scalability. Plus I think there will be ways of getting SegWit to be more anon over time. Bitcoin cash's solution will not scale. It's probably going to fail. [90% confidence.]
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Sure, if you're willing to pay on-blockchain fees, which are only going up given a constant block size. Neither option provides anonymity, so that's fairly irrelevant to this conversation. SegWit claims of future anonymity may come true, but given it's antithetical to a centralized business model, I wouldn't hold my breath.
3pt14159 9y ago
The important distinction with SegWit is that you can always go "on blockchain" to keep a transaction really private if it needs to be. Liquidity + optional complete anonymity + scalability. Plus I think there will be ways of getting SegWit to be more anon over time. Bitcoin cash's solution will not scale. It's probably going to fail. [90% confidence.]

m-p-3 9y ago

To be fair, as long as you do not have the private key to your wallet, you do not have complete control. Whoever kept their bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet and wanted to use Bitcoin Cash, it was their responsibility to move them to a wallet they fully control in advance to the fork.

SnowProblem 9y ago
Coinbase put limits on how much BTC could be transferred out each day, and didn't respond to support requests to increase the limits.

runeks 9y ago

This seems fishy to me. There’s a huge divergence in the price between the various exchanges that claim to trade BCH[1], signaling that arbitrageurs are unable to deposit to/withdraw from the exchanges. Many exchanges aren’t even allowing BCH deposits, meaning that the price isn’t connected to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, since you can’t sell these coins into the market. Right now there seems to exist multiple different BCH — one for each exchange — all of them with a different price because they’re not joined by the coins on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

Taek 9y ago

Soars to $700 because nobody who owns any is able to sell them. Trading is not open to the public except on one exchange right now, and while that exchange is holding a comfortable $350, it's also an unpopular and low-volume exchange - I'm guessing 90% of their users today made accounts today just to sell their Bitcoin Cash. I know I did. Once Kraken, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and the other major BCH supporting exchanges are actually accepting deposits, I imagine we'll see the price take a nosedive.

Animats 9y ago

Coinbase will either cave in on this or be sued and lose. Especially since they're sluggish about large withdrawals. The real risk for Coinbase comes if they don't have 100% of the Bitcoins on deposit. If they don't have all those Bitcoins, like Mt. Gox, we're going to find out.

thefalcon 9y ago
I can't imagine they'll continue to ignore the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Also it would be crazy for them to have encouraged their users to withdraw BTC prior to the fork if they were insolvent. I imagine it will all work out, though Coinbase loses lots of reputation points from me for by insisting on being so slow and reactionary instead of proactive like several other exchanges.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  It won't be that large for long. Only reason why it's so high is the few places you can sell it aren't accepting BCH deposits; the only way you can sell is if you had BTC there prior to August 1. There's a ton of pent up demand to sell; once those exchanges allow deposits, there will be a ton of dumping and the price will fall substantially.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 9y ago
    That makes it worse for Coinbase. They could be held liable for losses incurred because people couldn't access their BCH to sell at the top. This is the sort of thing which may involve Coinbase in litigation over whether SEC and CFTC rules on "fails to deliver" apply to them. When a real broker does something like this, they're on the hook for customer losses.
    - bdcravens 9y ago
      No, they won't. You can't deposit into those exchanges yet, so if those Coinbasers had those BCH in hand, ready to sell, they wouldn't be able to anyways. In other words, if you didn't have BTC on those exchanges prior to August 1, BCH is an unsaleable asset, so that price is not relevant.

granaldo 9y ago

Its at $750 now https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd Crazy that it was trading at $1200 BTC all-time high 3 years ago

thefalcon 9y ago
The latter part of this comment seems to confuse BCC/BCH with BTC.
dwaltrip 9y ago
Careful, there are huge discrepancies between exchanges, due to the illiquidity and difficulty in creating transactions at this time. Here is a list of exchanges that seem to be listing Bitcoin Cash (along with their prices): https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

bdcravens 9y ago

Coinbase will likely allow users to withdraw their BCH, but not exchange it, so they'll have to go elsewhere. They did the exact same thing with Ethereum Classic (after the price dropped like 80% from the initial spike, no less), and they ended support for those withdrawals at the end of 2016. To handle this fork differently could invite another lawsuit.

blhack 9y ago

Just to clarify: bitcoin cash (BCH) is only sortof worth $700. There aren't any mainstream exchanges accepting BCH deposits right now, so the market for BCH is limited mostly to people on kraken trading BCH with one another there only. The exchanges that are accepting BCH require 20 confirmations on your BCH deposit before they let you withdraw the BTC/XBT you traded them for. 20 confirmations right now would take multiple days. The exchanges offering this also seem to have pretty lax identity requirements, which is not a great sign.

jaycroft 9y ago
Further, as of this writing, more than 24 hours after the first forked block was mined, we still don't even have those 20 confirmations!

lorenzfx 9y ago

If the only difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is that bitcoin cash has larger block sizes (true?), why does bitcoin cash not go "back" to the bitcoin blockchain since it is now much longer and should also be a valid bitcoin cash blockchain?

cesarb 9y ago
Bitcoin Cash also has a rule that a specific block (the first one after a specific date and time) MUST be larger than 1 megabyte. If that specific block is smaller, it's not a valid Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Since that specific block is smaller than 1 megabyte in the main Bitcoin blockchain (because the maximum block size for Bitcoin is 1 megabyte), the current Bitcoin blockchain is not a valid Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

bdcravens 9y ago

Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled trading it (which they didn't with ETC when ETH forked), all those Coinbasers wouldn't be able to sell anyways. They'd be waiting like everyone else, so that $700 price wouldn't matter.

dsacco 9y ago
Regardless of the price, an exchange cannot seize customer assets by giving them 10 days notice for withdrawal. It doesn't matter if it's a separate currency - we have things resembling this in public markets, like stock splits. It doesn't matter if everyone can fork the cryptocurrency, that doesn't change the principle of a customer's asset. What Coinbase should have done is this: 1. Stood their ground on not supporting trading for the cryptocurrency, because they are under no obligation to develop new features. 2. Implemented a system to disburse the forked currency to customers if needed. 3. Implemented an explicit trigger price for acknowledging the new currency, which would function for potential forks of currencies already supported on the platform. If the currency does not pass a specific (very low, far lower than $700) mark, they don't disburse it, but if it does, they immediately support disbursal to anyone who requests it. The organic state of a cryptocurrency fork is that all extant holders receive a new asset, which may or may not be worth anything. A company cannot seize that asset without consideration. If the price of the currency subsequently crashes, then it crashes; that does not change the rights of a customer to their assets, which cannot be signed away with an email sent out 10 days before the event.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Regardless of the price, an exchange cannot seize customer assets by giving them 10 days notice for withdrawal. Perhaps, but the legal question is whether a protocol fork as a matter of law creates a new asset owned by the customer, creates a new asset owned by whoever controls the wallet keys, or merely creates an opportunity which someone who controls wallet keys may exploit to generate a new asset by participating in the ecosystem on the new side of the fork. (Fundamentally, this also lays near the question of legal ownership of Bitcoin or similar cryptocurrency in general and what specifically is “owned” when one owns them.)

blhack 9y ago

Coinbase is in a bad situation here. If they set a precedent that all BTC forks will be available to their users, then they open themselves to some pretty obvious DOS attacks. 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd. I think it's pretty obvious that they're going to just issue the BCH to people eventually. Here's another thought experiment: I am a now-extremely-wealthy bitcoin early adopter, and I am so happy at bitcoin's success that I am going to distribute $100 of USD cash per bitcoin to every person who can show me that they own a bitcoin. To claim your $100, send me a Self-addressed-stamped-envelope proving your bitcoin ownership, and I will mail you back the cash. Does coinbase have an obligation to send a bunch of SASEs to me? Are the coinbase customer's "owed" that $100? I personally don't think so. I think that's the tradeoff you're making by having coinbase securely store your coins for you.

celticninja 9y ago
It would require enough mining power to keep the chains alive, this is probably the only chance of keeping a fork of bitcoin alive, and even this is tenuous. Bitcoin Cash has a large support base however very little of that seems to be in the form of miners and you can have all the supporters and users in the world, but if you have no miners then you have no network. Given that they will use the same technology and have the same size block reward it doesn't seem to make sense to mine the currency that is worth less. When difficulty adjusts downwards you may get more block rewards initially but unless the coins hit parity there will always be a benefit in mining the more valuable coin.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  It also doesn't make sense to mine a currency that has no users...or people taking it as payment. If there is a user base, miners will materialize.
hendzen 9y ago
Yes we expect Coinbase to support them all. Public companies have complicated stock actions like spinoffs (i.e. "Forking" the company), rights offerings, scrip offerings, stock dividends, etc. Do you think ETrade gets to not give their users the results of such actions because it would be complex to implement?

2paisay 9y ago

I thought it was supposed to be a decenteralized peer to peer utopia. Now it all depends on Coinbase's whims.

danielharrison 9y ago
Bitcoin does not equal coinbase. Two completely different things.

eadmund 9y ago

Without JavaScript, the article is a blank page, containing merely 'SEARCH' and '10:18 AM ET'. What's it say?

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I wonder sometimes if the origin of coinage was similarly fraught with these sorts of challenges. The history of money exhibit at the British Museum is pretty awesome and they go over some of the 'coin scams' of the day like nicking bits off the coins and remelting them into new coins, melting coins and alloying them with other metals so that they 'felt right' but were diluted. People who no longer had to be 'landed' could steal enough coins and be 'rich'. Etc. So back in that time when a new coin came out, I'm sure the money changers would spend good long time watching it to see how it was abused before they started accepting it as a 'real' coin. Seems like much the same is true for blockchain currencies, they all need a bit of 'bake time' before you really understand both the demand and the risks associated with them.

duderific 9y ago
Heck, you can see this in US coinage today. A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid. The cost of the metal gets to a point where it doesn't make sense to use it in the currency anymore. For example, if the metal in a quarter was worth more than $.25, you could simply melt it down and sell it for more than the face value (assuming the cost of melting etc. could be brought down at volume).
- 0xffff2 9y ago
  > A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid. I felt the same, but as far as I can tell the current quarter composition weighs 84% as much as the heaviest quarter ever produced and 90% as much as any quarter made since 1873. The quarter's composition has only changed three times in the history of the United States.
  - csours 9y ago
    You were also smaller when you were younger...
  - Frondo 9y ago
    I can think of another reason why a handheld object would seem bigger and heavier when you're young and small, as opposed to when you're old and big...

vetrom 9y ago

So you needed to get 'your' BTC into a real wallet (and not an exchange) to be able to have pre-fork BTC that would act as BCH. While similar to both currency and commodity, this is one of the situations where cryptocurrency acts as more of a fungible contract than either the currency or commodity. IANAL, but it seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of law written on that. I'd argue that Coinbase expended its fiduciary duty by warning their users of the fork. Coinbase/kraken/et al., however, don't create/issue the cryptocoins, so it's probably a misnomer to call them exchanges. At best, they are brokerages. Now say that a bunch of users decided to instruct their broker that's holding their security in trust to so assign the security to the user, and the brokerage sat on that transaction rather than perform the request in a timely fashion? I'd say that potentially counts as a whole host of other actionable events, depending on the intent of the brokerage operators. Not sure if I'd call that front running, but that sounds like a good start to investigate.

davesque 9y ago
> I'd argue that Coinbase expended its fiduciary duty by warning their users of the fork. But people are arguing, and I think convincingly, that Coinbase didn't provide enough lead time after sending out the email announcing their decision. Coinbase also essentially gets to pocket all the extra value which should reasonably have belonged to their customers. IANAL either, but I have to imagine there are the beginnings of something like an unjust enrichment claim here.

IanDrake 9y ago

This experiment in crypto currency has made me see the value in fiat money, which is probably the opposite of the desired effect. At the end of they day, these digital monetary schemes have become less of a currency and more of a commodity. Can someone explain to me why I should be less jaded about crypto currencies?

lawn 9y ago

Note that Bitstamp, another large exchange, took a similar stance as Coinbase and has issued an update stating customers will receive their BHC balance: https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/ https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/ For those of our customers who chose to leave their BTC on our platform at the time of the fork, we recorded their BCH balances for the timestamp of the last common block (block 478558), which is 1 August 2017, 13:16:14 UTC. These BCH balances will be made available to our customers as soon as it is safe to do so. If and when the Bitcoin Cash system has been thoroughly tested and is sufficiently stable, we will then consider listing BCH. However, a series of technical, safety and regulatory requirements need to be met in order for this to occur, and it is still too early in the day to make realistic predictions about the timeframes involved.

GoodInvestor 9y ago

Not sure why there's so much hype. Of course the price is going to be up, there's not enough BCH to be traded so naturally the demand will cause the price to go up temporarily.

tobltobs 9y ago

Isn't this screaming for lawsuits in this thread driving the idea of an currency independent of any central authority ad absurdum?

Teknoman117 9y ago

I thought that with Coinbase you really didn't "own" the coins. As in, if you bought a bitcoin via Coinbase you really didn't hold a bitcoin, you really just held a promise that Coinbase would give you a bitcoin at a later date. If that were the case, would they actually be liable for giving you anything related to bitcoin forks? It's also not like they didn't give warning ahead of time either. If you really wanted to use BCC/BCH (whatever gets decided on) you could've just moved the funds out of Coinbase into an offline wallet and sent them back post fork.