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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

The point is, splits and civil wars cause customer confusion and are harmful for bitcoin adoption. Coinbase is throwing some political weight around by saying "We won't support BCH." Their competitors do, so are customers supposed to think it's a technical challenge to support BCH?

It's just strange that Coinbase either wasn't prepared or sees BCH as a threat. Balkanization of bitcoin is unnecessary. Why refuse to support what everyone else supports? https://twitter.com/Yelka_Pineda/status/891020902066003968

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In my view, as a bystander with no skin in the game, the BCH fork is very much political, so there's no reason why exchanges should not take a political stance in response. It's hardly a question of supporting what "everyone else" supports, Bitstamp has the same position for instance.

>the BCH fork is very much politica

There are political elements, for sure, but the overall reason for it is there are a genuine segment of people who believe segwit is kludge, and on chain scaling is the way forward.

Whether or not those people are correct, this chain represents their version of the bitcoin vision, dismissing it as a political move is a tad arrogant.

If you believe that splits cause customer confusion, and balkanization is unnecessary, then one way to help this problem is to use all your weight to ensure that BCH fails, not only to fix this split but also to demonstrate for any future splits that they will have little to gain.

Helping the split in any way (e.g. by making the split easier to use or by acknowledging it as a reasonable alternative) means facilitating future splits and future balkanization, driving down long term value of BTC.

> splits and civil wars cause customer confusion and are harmful for bitcoin adoption

I agree with this point, and I see Coinbase's comm as trust-building with their (perhaps nonvocal majority?) customers.

The future of this technology cannot work if you must understand the jargon and consequences of a fork (and whatever else can happen), and then form an opinion of your exchanges as a mainstream adopter based upon how they deal with these intricacies. Most people just want something easy to use. Coinbase has allowed that happy path to continue, and I trust them as a result of the manner in which they handled this event.

(Now, for people in-the-know, things are different. But I'd bet that Coinbase's target audience is not blockchain hackers.)

Why exactly should Coinbase support every new altcoin? I seriously can not understand your point.

Doesn't Coinbase reduce the amount of customer confusion by offering fewer cryptocurrencies to purchase?

It perhaps makes sense from a business standpoint: why support a new coin from day 1 instead of waiting for the ecosystem to mature? Coinbase already doesn't support other coins like XRP or Monero or whatnot.

It's a little different in the case of BCH, as it is with ETC. They aren't mere altcoins. They're forks, and if you owned coins on the chain before the splits, you now own those coins on both forks. Coinbase offers the illusion that you owned actual coins. To be fully faithful to the illusion, coin you owned on Coinbase before the split should have the same properties it would have if you owned the coins on their blockchains.

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