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All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account.

All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Pardon the naive question, but does this mean Coinbase users who held Bitcoin have essentially "doubled their money"?

deleted 9y ago
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chrisa 9y ago
They get one BCH for each BTC they held, but it's not double in terms of USD. Bitcoin is currently selling for around $17k, and BCH will open at $3k
jncraton 9y ago
Sort of. They now hold as much BCH as they had BTC on August 1st. However, BTC is worth significantly more than BCH in terms of dollars currently. The gain is more like ~20% in dollars.
derefr 9y ago
An "equal balance of Bitcoin Cash", as in 1000BTC becomes joined by 1000BCH. BCH is right now worth about 1/10th the value of BTC, so people have 110%ed their money. Also, people who just had money sitting around in a private wallet on the blockchain—that is, outside of any exchange—have also 110%ed their money; there's nothing special about Coinbase, it happened for any and all BTCs that existed on 2017-08-01. (What is special is the accounts at the other exchanges, who have thusfar mostly not provided their users with access to their equivalent BCH gains. It can be argued that the gains were made to the exchange's float, rather than to the users' accounts, so the BCH isn't "inherently" owned by the depositors, any more than capital gains of leveraged investments using a bank's liabilities are owed to the depositors of said bank. Really, since this "debt" has no (legal or smart-) contractual existence, it's up to social norms whether individual exchanges capitulate and hand over the BCH gains they've accrued.)
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
That's what I thought with the Cash fork, suddenly in addition to an X amount of BTC you also get an Y amount of a new cryptocurrency for free - no financial investment or mining required. Logically what should happen is that the bitcoin price dropped by the exact amount of what bitcoin cash was worth, but in reality that's not true because the market is not rational. I can imagine Coinbase held out on offering trading - if everyone wanted to cash out then Coinbase suddenly had to come up with millions of dollars that didn't come in through normal purchases of e.g. bitcoin. IMO, bitcoin cash was generating valuable cryptocurrencies out of thin air.
pc86 9y ago
Well, "all customers" is relative. I held some BTC over the 8/1 date mentioned in their release, and should have BCH to support it. Currently the balance is 0.0. I've submitted a support request and asked my lawyer to draft a letter but at this point I'm assuming CoinBase stole five figures from me (based on today's average price) until proven otherwise.

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chrisa 9y ago

They get one BCH for each BTC they held, but it's not double in terms of USD. Bitcoin is currently selling for around $17k, and BCH will open at $3k

jncraton 9y ago

Sort of. They now hold as much BCH as they had BTC on August 1st. However, BTC is worth significantly more than BCH in terms of dollars currently. The gain is more like ~20% in dollars.

derefr 9y ago

An "equal balance of Bitcoin Cash", as in 1000BTC becomes joined by 1000BCH. BCH is right now worth about 1/10th the value of BTC, so people have 110%ed their money. Also, people who just had money sitting around in a private wallet on the blockchain—that is, outside of any exchange—have also 110%ed their money; there's nothing special about Coinbase, it happened for any and all BTCs that existed on 2017-08-01. (What is special is the accounts at the other exchanges, who have thusfar mostly not provided their users with access to their equivalent BCH gains. It can be argued that the gains were made to the exchange's float, rather than to the users' accounts, so the BCH isn't "inherently" owned by the depositors, any more than capital gains of leveraged investments using a bank's liabilities are owed to the depositors of said bank. Really, since this "debt" has no (legal or smart-) contractual existence, it's up to social norms whether individual exchanges capitulate and hand over the BCH gains they've accrued.)

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

That's what I thought with the Cash fork, suddenly in addition to an X amount of BTC you also get an Y amount of a new cryptocurrency for free - no financial investment or mining required. Logically what should happen is that the bitcoin price dropped by the exact amount of what bitcoin cash was worth, but in reality that's not true because the market is not rational. I can imagine Coinbase held out on offering trading - if everyone wanted to cash out then Coinbase suddenly had to come up with millions of dollars that didn't come in through normal purchases of e.g. bitcoin. IMO, bitcoin cash was generating valuable cryptocurrencies out of thin air.

pc86 9y ago

Well, "all customers" is relative. I held some BTC over the 8/1 date mentioned in their release, and should have BCH to support it. Currently the balance is 0.0. I've submitted a support request and asked my lawyer to draft a letter but at this point I'm assuming CoinBase stole five figures from me (based on today's average price) until proven otherwise.