Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue | Hacker News Reader

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

fortune.com

317 pointsabhi3412 comments

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.

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.

> 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.)

While I'm sure that a lawyer can spin in circles arguing semantics over what is bitcoin, the stance that the SEC has taken is that cryptocurrencies are commodity-assets, and therefore any derived assets (forks, etc) are the property of the asset owner.

In what way is a fork a derived asset? Let's say an advertiser, unprompted, decided to send a free DVD to everyone who owns a sailboat. Your sailboat is in storage at a large marina that stores hundreds of sailboats, so the publisher drops a big stack of these DVDs in front of the marina office. Is the ownership of the marina obligated to accept these DVDs and mail one to each owner at its own cost? Receiving unsolicited DVDs is not in your storage contract with the marina.

Interesting analogy! Compare to the one I gave [1]. As you've described it here, I would agree that they don't have an obligation to mail the DVDs out. However, if:

A) The marina owner had entered into a fiduciary relationship with you regarding the possession of your boat to your benefit, and

B) The DVDs were sent to the fiduciary with instructions to be given to the boat owners, and

C) A reasonable person would believe that the boat owner would regard the DVD to have enough value to care about,

Then the marina owner would be obligated to at least ensure that the boat owners can access their DVD, if they wish to, for some reasonable period (say, 60 days). For example, by leaving it with the boat or dropping it in the boat owners' locker at the harbor office, or informing them of their property with the next scheduled communication (in a way that leaves them 60 days etc).

[1] I know "comparing a comparison", but here ya go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913261

I'll add another (flawed of course) analogy:

You have a shed to store valuables. Because that's inconvenient for selling your stuff as you live far outside the city, you get a storage unit in the city and move some of your belongings there. There is a big government grant for all storage buildings based on the current value they store. Your shed at home is pretty empty, so you don't get much. The owner of your storage unit gets a lot of money. Does he owe you?

Where do you draw the line though? Anyone can invent new tokens and grant them to bitcoin holders; should Coinbase be required to support every one?

This is not a hypothetical question. I particpated in two airdrops this year, Stellar and Byteball. I immediately sold the airdropped tokens and increased my bitcoin holdings by 3%. But I don't think Coinbase should be required to support Stellar or Byteball just because they did airdrops to Bitcoin holders.

Byteball in particular seems like just some guy's random project and only has value because of the current investment bubble in anything that looks like a cryptocurrency. I wouldn't trust it to be secure or work properly. What if Byteball is just a huge scam, and the creator can secretly mint tokens at will? Now Coinbase is participating in a scam!

Yes, Coinbase should be required to support disbursal for every one, with the proviso that it either passes a certain price or passes a number of customers who want to withdraw it.

Why? By using Coinbase you are saying, "I don't want to hold any bitcoins myself, I want a bank to hold some value, denominated in BTC, on my behalf". For all depositers care, Coinbase might have zero Bitcoins issued before the fork.

It's like depositing a dollar to a bank, and then finding out that it had been signed by Andy Warhol in invisible ink and asking for the specific dollar back. Sorry, you shouldn't have deposited in a bank. You can get a dollar back, but not the same one you deposited.

What you're looking for is more like a safety deposit box for Bitcoins. That's a whole separate product, with a different fee structure.

Exactly.

The only argument you can make is Coinbase not givint a "reasonable" amount of foresight to users (who would pressumble have the right of advanced time/knowledge to convert to USD, etc and then back to BTC (on another "exchange").

I have no idea is this is true or not, but this is the only criticism of Coinbase you can have here.

Let's say there is a court case where the judge awards all shareholders of AAPL $100 of compensation for every share held (It's to the shareholders, but not the company, because the court case involved shareholders vs management). The government sends $100 per share to each registered holder. Your investment fund is the registered holder of AAPL securities instead of you. Do you get $100 per share that was held on your behalf, or do the operators of the investment fund get it?

I think that's a great analogy for each of us thinking about our own ethical intuition. But if you're literally asking what would actually happen, I'm guessing the answer is...there would probably be a lawsuit and the courts would figure it out. Which is probably exactly what will happen here, if Coinbase continues to not support the Bitcoin fork and its value holds long enough.

not likely. corporate payouts happen all the time based on share ownership.

Isn't that just a dividend at that point? In the real world investment funds have fairly complex dividend rules (how much is reinvested in the fund, how much is skimmed for fund manager fees, etc), and regulations have managed to force such funds to disclose all of those policies up front (prospectus) and keep them up-to-date.

In the other fork in this discussion thread, the banking analogy: we're talking about an exotic interest payment of sorts. Again here, banking regulations require banks to disclose interest rates and payment details and management fees up front for accounts. But banks in the real world are largely allowed to reap the majority of profits from an investment that goes well, and doesn't have to apply much if any of that back to the savings accounts from which it utilized stored funds to fund that investment.

Which is to say that Coinbase may be doing nothing wrong according to either real world analogy, with the big difference being the "wild frontier" of existing in an under-regulated space with fewer up-front disclosure guarantees.

Both this and dividends are payments to shareholders but this is different because it's not funded by the company itself. It's a third party electing to pay every shareholder. Also, dividends are regular events, but getting a new asset that can be traded is not.

I guess that depends too on what you think "the company" is in this case, going back to struggling with whether or not this analogizes to a stock split or not.

In the AAPL example, it's not a stock split.

> 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.

So if I fork Bitcoin into Billycoin, this demands action by Coinbase?

Yes.

(And as I stated in the comment - with a proviso that the price or adoption of the cryptocurrency pass a very low but nontrivial bar.)

Sounds like bdcravens and I should launch Billycoin, but only have it trade on an exchange we control, with no liquidity, so we could push its price through the roof.

I've also just sold 0.000001% equity in my startup to my dad for $10. Does anyone want to invest in my billion dollar idea? Am I a unicorn?

I don't get the "10 days notice" argument. Shouldn't it be the default assumption that they won't support any fork at any point UNLESS they announced support? It's not like they tricked anybody into it, or made it unusually difficult to withdraw BTC.

Their 10 day notice is also consistent with messaging Coinbase has been putting out for months on what their initial fork policy would be.

https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...

I think about it in a different way. The fact that a certain amount of BTC is also the same amount of BCC is tied to a specific way of owning bitcoins (i.e. "physical" bitcoins in a wallet).

But when you buy a certain amount of BTC on coinbase, you will just buy that abstract amount, there is no wallet tied to you, in the same way that when you have money in a bank you don't own any specific bill. The bank may not even have that amount, at least not in the form of physical cash.

To continue the analogy, let's say that the Central Bank says "in order to fight fake bills, whoever brings old 20 USD bills will get back a new 20 USD bill PLUS a 20 EUR bill." If you have 1000 USD in a bank, are you automatically entitled to 1000 EUR, or are you supposed to get first the bills from the bank ? And if you do, should the bank give you old bills or can it give you the new bills ?

That's a fair analogy. I think implementing the features some people are asking for creates a myriad of additional issues that should be individually considered.

Dealing with this on a case-by case basis (as they seem to be doing) makes more sense.

It might have been nice if they gave more advanced notice, but in my opinion they shouldn't be expected to give ANY notice of this type of thing.

I think they're handling it well.

I would agree, and I would add that people seem to be ignoring that BCH is extremely unstable right now. They've only mined ~18 blocks since inception two days ago (Normal is ~144/day), and the fact that a single Reddit post was capable of keeping miners for mining for a full 12 hours seems to indicate that the hashing power is hardly distributed. Even exchanges that are supporting BCH aren't allowing deposits or withdrawals right now for this reason.

So even if Coinbase did allow people to withdraw BCH, they currently couldn't use it for anything (Because Coinbase is not trading BCH), and they'd be waiting hours or more likely days to reach enough confirmations to have any sense of security over the coins. So doing something about it now vs. considering doing something about it in a couple days after the dust settles makes little difference.

If you have transferred funds to Coinbase and bought a Bitcoin, Coinbase owes you 1 BTC. That is your claim against them. Nothing else.

They do not own you Clams or Stellars or Byteball or any other token that you did not buy.

Keep in mind that this is the fourth coin to be initally distributed to the Bitcoin UTXO set this year alone. If anything, supporting one but not the other would increase their risk exposure, legally as well as support wise. Every token carries risk.

Who says it's without consideration? They're holding onto your BTC for you. That's not a free service. The bank analogy is holding customer cash at zero interest.

Their only obligation is to maintain your BTC balance with BTC defined as the longest chain. It doesn't matter how popular a fork is, it's not their problem.

While I agree that the current price is not necessarily reflective of an open market, it's equally unclear which direction that represents. Remember, every off exchange BTC now has a counterpart on both prongs of the fork. Which side will sell for which side when the market clears remains to be seen.

I read an interesting theory this morning:

Because there is greatly reduced liquidity of BCH (most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do), supply of BCH is artificially limited at the moment. Proponents of BCH can trade their BTC for BCH at a rate greater than they believe it is worth to easily pump the value and 'market cap' (most market cap stats have no measure of this 'locked supply') to make BCH appear more popular than it is at a fraction of the price that would be necessary if selling was easy. This could sway more miners to choose to mine BCH over BTC, and in doing so, actually increase the real value of BCH.

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6ooorn/small_blockers_...

> most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do

It's much more than that. The exchanges that list support do not accept deposits. They won't even show you a deposit address. So you can't sell anywhere at the moment, unless you are one of the few who were awarded BCH by your exchange.

The only thing you seem to be able to do right now is to buy it for Bitcoins, not move it. There have been rumors of two Chinese exchanges accepting it, and they do indeed list deposit addresses, but it does not seem to work.

Yet at the same time, media everywhere (including this very thread), hype up the great market cap. I guess at least someone got what they came for.

> the current high price is artificial.

That's absolutely clear to me, and I was dying to find a way to short it. I just found out that plus500 allows that... I don't like that platform, but I just placed my shorts (even if now it's "only" $500)

FYI this site(plus500) is not accessible from the USA

Ah, I see!!

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.

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.

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.

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?

Not just anybody can "fork" a company. Anyone and everyone can fork a blockchain multiple times.

That's immaterial, because a company cannot force customers to forfeit assets by giving them a 10 day ultimatum.

Don't store your coins on an exchange then.. like you've been told over and over and over again

Oh yeah, that's absolute shit and there's been a precedent set that'll end with Coinbase owing a lot of money.

I'm just pointing out that they shouldn't have to support anything (so long as a proper warning is given if possible).

If it is so simple, why is this the only fork which has happened to BTC in the past 9 years?

It's not.

Same reason it took someone three years to create an altcoin. Doing so had no benefit.. until it did.

Because forking isn't the hard part. Actually maintaining and creating a better block chain is.

Either way, that's anecdotal.

But the currency exchange booth in the mall is not the New York Stock Exchange. Coinbase is more the former than the latter.

The blockchain itself is the "exchange" in the sense of being the arbiter of trades; if you want something to support all these actions, it should be implemented somehow into the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain itself. Or a... meta-blockchain, I guess. A distributed-consensus DAG+constraint system representing the relationships of various blockchains to one-another, without requiring "centralized" side-chaining in a chain that might be the very one you're trying to fork away from.

False. The blockchain is the DTCC. Coinbase is the exchange.

All of those actions are contractually specified. If Coca-Cola decided to go off-script and send a rubber ducky to each shareholder, ETrade would not be responsible for receiving 3 million rubber duckies and sending one to each shareholder that they hold stock for.

Property dividends are a thing. I would be quite surprised if ETrade got away with swiping property dividends from its clients.

Except bitcoin don't have a "company" that pays dividend per say. Owning bitcoin doesn't give ownership to anything beyond bitcoin itself. I cannot pay a random dividend to APPL stock holders because I am not AAPL. Why would Coinbase has to accept this random "dividend" from another random entity?

> 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd.

Of course it's absurd, and nobody expects them to support 10 forks a day. If that was actually happening, Coinbase would be in a much better position to say no.

But this is a single fork, and one where the new currency has a lot of value, enough that customers are threatening to sue.

Anyone can sue but therr is no case. You are responsible for who you let hold your coins. If someone gives everyone who is holding a coin a new coin whoever is holding your coin doesn't have to accept it; Unless you agreed beforehand. In this case they told you before they will not accept it and you still left the coins with them.

>You are responsible for who you let hold your coins

The SEC has said that ICO tokens are securities. Do you really think intermediaries and wallets have no legal restrictions or obligations dictating what happens to them?

You can't categorically say that the fact they stated they won't accept BCC makes it completely legal for them to withhold millions of dollars worth of crypto. Terms of service ≠ securities law.

As one of the btc nouveaux rich, help me understand something I see reoccurring among my other btc-rich friends. Generally, when you're up big (and in some cases extremely wealthy), you diversify your investments in order to preserver your wealth. However, almost without exception my btc friends are such believers that they are holding on for the ride forever.

Is it just that the risk-averse were initially drawn to btc as a speculative vehicle? Or is it a matter of principle to hold forever?

I've seen the same -- I know someone who got in early to BTC, then moved it all into Ethereum early, such that he has enough to comfortably retire today. But he won't cash any of it in except for a small amount each month to live on, while he lives rent free with others.

When I explain the logic of hedging and mitigating risk and locking in gains, he was insistent that the right strategy is to hold because it's going to go up some more, and he doesn't need the money now for any of his current objectives.

Come to think of it, I should at least consider that he's making it up, but I've met him several time and he's well versed in crypto and way ahead of the curve in learning about this stuff. Who knows?

> Come to think of it, I should at least consider that he's making it up, but I've met him several time and he's well versed in crypto and way ahead of the curve in learning about this stuff. Who knows?

If you poll people after a presidential election, a higher percentage of people claim to have voted for the winning candidate than voted for the winning candidate.

It's a lot easier to be well-versed in crypto and claim you won some big bets, than it is to be well-versed in crypto and actually have won enough big bets to "comfortably retire". The former requires hindsight, and the latter requires immense luck and timing.

Would he have to be well-versed to have enough BTC to retire? Surely you could just get on board the hype train at the right station, when it was cheap enough to buy a few, and maybe at the urging of a colleague, and go from there.

None of the few people I know with BTC are especially well-versed in it.

This isn't that terrible. However its much much less risk and at worst only tiny bit less upside to put 34% in Ethereum, 33% in Bitcoin, and 33% in a basket of all else possible.

I'd suggest S&P index funds for the remaining third. If it's FU money already, taking out a third and putting into a known-decent investment because you don't need it right now should be a good way to ensure that you can actually retire whenever you'd like to.

I think the parent comment is just a hypothetical situation, and blhack isn't actually a bitcoin millionaire.

Just to clarify, yeah. Definitely not a bitcoin millionaire.

Personally, I'm not "extremely wealthy", but I'm certainly holding a larger percentage of my net worth in bitcoin than is prudent. However, I sold enough to make back my initial investment long ago; if it crashes to zero tomorrow I won't be ruined.

I'm not holding bitcoins as a matter of principle. I have a number in mind, and if I hit it I will have enough money to retire at 35. At that point I plan to sell ~90% of my bitcoins.

I could sell some now, and make a significant amount of money. But I already have plenty of money saved; a little more isn't going to change my life. For my bitcoin investment it's FU money or bust, and any amount I sell now just lowers the chances that I'll ever get to FU money.

Wow, I'd love some advice on getting there. I've found myself in cycles of debt for the past many years.

> ... initially drawn to btc as a speculative vehicle? Or is it a matter of principle to hold forever?

I got involved with btc when it was in the single digits, the crowd was very different then - cryptoanarchists. So your call to "diversify your investments" sounds to me much more like "diversify your politics", which is obviously a silly thing to tell somebody - especially somebody whose politics is any anarcho flavor. While I can only speak for myself, I do think this is true for many others: I was already living pretty comfortably and a few million isn't enough of appreciably change one's quality of life as a software developer.

As someone that deals with political parties and regulatory regimes in many countries at once, diversify your political isn't silly at all. Or at least I feel like being unsubscribed from one countries politics has only given me advantages, even if it is less common to not be married to a political flavor.

> ...diversify your political isn't silly at all.

It is, as most political differences are rooted in mutually exclusive ideas. If you are advocating for simply being open to considering alternative positions and measuring them against your own present position - then I agree with you, that is nice. But I would describe that as "diversify your politics", I'd describe that as being intellectually honest.

One way to diversify your politics is to get in bed with multiple mutually exclusive political parties. That way, no matter who wins, you'll have friends in high places.

> is it a matter of principle to hold forever?

There was a reply to this, now deleted:

> this is a pretty common (and self-destructive) phenomenon amongst unsophisticated investors

On the contrary, it's much more common for unsophisticated investors to sell their winners too early.

Dumb money is more emotional. Dumb money is risk averse and can't tolerate losses, so holds on to losers forever. Dumb money harvests winners after a 50% or 100% gain and reinvests in losers.

Smart money is coldly rational instead of emotional. Smart money isn't afraid of small losses. Smart money sells losers quickly and takes many small losses. Smart money holds one or two winners for a long time for 1000% and 10000% gains.

I'm sure some long-term bitcoin holders are ideological, but most are coldly rational smart money.

No. Smart money understands why something is valuable and to what extent along with weighing the alternatives.

Dumb money invests emotionally without comprehending why a thing is traded for other things.

> As one of the btc nouveaux rich, help me understand something I see reoccurring among my other btc-rich friends. Generally, when you're up big (and in some cases extremely wealthy), you diversify your investments in order to preserver your wealth. However, almost without exception my btc friends are such believers that they are holding on for the ride forever.

That's the idea.

However, you have to understand that if say SNAP stocks made someone rich, then diversifying makes sense, but if you got rich by some investment in some company Cayman Islands (but with a real business model), then you wouldn't just bring back the money or part of it purely for the sake of diversification.

In other words, diversification away from bitcoin isn't in the same boat as diversifying away from real estate or some stock.

From your friend's perspective, if they sell $100K worth of bitcoin, then is it possible that they might end getting on the radar of the govt and could be on hook for more than $100K?

In addition to that, bitcoiners also believe that bitcoin hasn't reached it's peak, so when it reaches it's peak, they wouldn't have to sell their bitcoins (because every business would accept bitcoin). You don't even have to go to 'every business' part. Even if half of the businesses accept bitcoin, then they don't need to sell their bitcoins.

Finally, if your nouveaux rich friends expect a Venezuala style situation, then, holding it further is the rational choice from their perspective.

> From your friend's perspective, if they sell $100K worth of bitcoin, then is it possible that they might end getting on the radar of the govt and could be on hook for more than $100K?

You really have to be on the radar if you plan on reasonably enjoying that kind of wealth. There are plenty of legit ways of minimizing the tax burden of that kind of investment.

Calling the top and bottom is a fools game. Diversification simply helps protect an entire asset class/sector from ruining you.

If you currently hold bitcoins which you mined, then they are a highly liquid assets because tomorrow you could flee the country and still have this wealth go with you. now I don't think most people think that they need to flee the country any time soon, but either way, it ISN'T the same thing as diversifying your non-crypto assets.

I am merely trying to explain to whomsoever wants to know why these people won't sell their crypto even to diversification, please don't start yelling at me.

> 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day.

I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to mine a new block on-demand.

It simply is not worth throwing that computing power at a DDOS attack. Moreover, if I _had_ that computing power, I'd rather just mine a regular block and get that sweet miner's reward.

You could always make a forked version with a lowered difficulty. Doesn't sound unreasonable

In fact, Bitcoin Cash does have modified retargeting that drops difficulty much faster. (they could just have well dropped difficulty by 100 times at the fork, as well)

So you have useless tokens. Value is perception.

And should Coinbase then be obligated to distribute those useless tokens?

No of course not. If the tokens are useless then nobody will blame Coinbase for not supporting them. But we're talking about BCH here, which is bigger than all other coins save Bitcoin and Etherium. There's a LOT of money at stake here.

At what point do you know if it is useless or not? Who decides? How long should Coinbase wait to decide to support it..before it becomes useful or after?

> 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day

Not really. You are forgetting how the difficulty works (or simply don't understand bitcoin).

You'd have to have a significant percentage of the bitcoin mining infrastructure. If you have 1% of the bitcoin mining infrastructure it would take 100x the time to mine a block, or 1000 mins, or basically half a day, that would take a week of not getting bitcoin simply to confirm the new chain. As it is this new coin accounts for like 5% of the bitcoin mining power.

To do 10 new forks every day would take a 70% of the bitcoin mining power to sustain for just a week.

This is assuming that forks retain the difficulty target, which they don't have to. In fact, the Bitcoin Cash fork doesn't.

You can encode an immediate diff reduction as part of the hard fork. The block produced with too low a diff will make it invalid on the original chain, thus forking. It's trivial to create as many hard forks as you want.

No it wouldn't. All you have to do is change the proof of work algorithm.

Bitcoin Cash literally did thus, by reducing the the difficulty.

There's a really easy technical solution to this - let me have a hot wallet with coinbase and when i want to withdraw my bitcoins i can choose to have them hand off the private key for the account to me with bitcoins as of the block I deposited it

There's logic in these arguments; however, they ignore securities laws.

If BTC is a security, which the regulators probably think it is, then yes—you have to have a mechanism to bring concepts like splits, tenders, dividends to holders of the security if you are going to hold them for their benefit.

Developers considering forks will likely be required to follow yet unclarified rules around how much, how often, waiting and disclosure periods, etc.

(It's useful to consider how rules and systems have evolved governing how often Apple can split its stock or how Facebook investors are notified about tender offers, etc.)

This article is an entertaining read on that considers some of the issues discussed in this thread:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/bitcoin-e...

It's interesting to think about a fork as a stock split, because there is no entity to decide on a split happening.

It's really a 3rd party issuing tokens based on proof of bitcoin ownership.

Definitely going to be some interesting times for financial regulators!

the cftc has ruled that bitcoin is a commodity.

The funny thing is that Bitcoin, because of its decentralized nature, doesn't have an entity tied to it (like Apple and AAPL). So who has the authority to "split" bitcoin? To "spin off" bitcoin? And under what obligation are the exchanges required to accept those modifications/additions to bitcoin?

It's more like I announce tomorrow that I am going to issue a Pear stock at 1:1 for each existing AAPL stocker holder. Would Stock Brokers like Scottrade need to accept Pear stock on behalf of their customers that owns AAPL stock? Under what authority can I "spin off" an AAPL stock?

I don't think Coinbase is under any obligation to honor any Bitcoin spin-off/fork/split, unless it is done by an authority of bitcoin (like Apple and AAPL), which for decentralized crypto currency like bitcoin means no one.

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/

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

... Giving a few days to do it. Ignoring withdrawal limits the customers cannot raise.

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.

That's wrong. If I hold 1 BTC, I'll have 1 BTC and 1 BCH after the fork. If I sell for the equivalent of 1 BTC in USD (say, $2500), I'll have $2500 after the fork, instead of $2500+$700 (price of 1 BTC + price of 1 BCH)

I think an argument against that is that 10 days is a pretty short deadline to act to prevent a potentially large financial loss. Especially if you were on vacation, not following the news about bitcoin, etc.

Coinbase doesn't have to support trading BCC, they can simply provide a withdrawal function so people can claim their BCC and move on with their lives. Their decision to ignore it entirely is going to get them sued and it's going to cost them.

Does the stock market offer do-overs if there is a significant move against you while you're on vacation?

Would Coinbase normally be held accountable for a significant move in Bitcoin against you while you're on vacation?

Coinbase isn't a company to secure your Bitcoins against the value of the dollar, it's a company that stores Bitcoins and facilitates transactions.

No, what I'm saying is by refusing to allow withdrawal of the "new" coins, they put themselves in the position to be sued because clients lose potentially a lot of free money.

It's an opportunity cost: if I missed out on some big trades while the price was high due to their decision to withhold the keys, I'm rightfully annoyed by it.

Of course leaving legality out of it, it'd also just be a smart thing to do because it makes their customers happy and maintains goodwill. Coinbase is fairly respected in the crypto space and making their customers happy during a turbulent period can only be good for them in the long run.

They will capitulate eventually. Same thing happened with ETH/ETC.

> No, what I'm saying is by refusing to allow withdrawal of the "new" coins, they put themselves in the position to be sued because clients lose potentially a lot of free money.

Coinbase is a company that handles people's Bitcoin (and a couple other currencies). Coinbase never made any promises to support other currencies that copy Bitcoin's balances or are otherwise awarded to Bitcoin users. Bitcoin Cash isn't mentioned or promised in any of Coinbase's advertising materials. Handling of Bitcoin Cash is a service that Coinbase has never claimed to offer.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get what you're saying but it doesn't really matter. If they don't want to lose a lot of customers (and revenue) they'll offer a withdrawal option.

No, because exchanges in public markets never get to this point. Unless you're margin called, you're not put into a position where you forfeit your assets. Moreover that's still not an ultimatum where value simply goes from the customer to the exchange without any consideration - it occurs because the assets you borrowed from the exchange in the first place have been lost or exposed to great risk.

This is not about a do over, it's about the ultimatum being reasonable. If an exchange declared that you had 10 days to withdraw funds issued by, say, dividends, or you'd simply lose those funds with no consideration or equitable exchange, it would be sued (and successfully so).

Coinbase did not (and does not) need to allow trading in order to disburse the forked currency to existing customers.

That doesn't resemble anything like the business practices of mature exchanges. The best analogy I can think of offhand is a stock split or (more frequently) a dividend. An exchange could not in any universe give its customers 10 days to withdraw its funds or agree to forfeiture.

You don't just get to take customer assets because you sent out an email and gave them 10 days. This is why we have the concept of consideration in the first place.

There are actually some somewhat analogous situations in the US listed equity options markets. Options are typically adjusted for corporate actions other than regular dividends. However, special dividends are only adjusted for if they are more than 12.5 cents per share. And for voluntary corporate actions the options are adjusted according to whatever would happen to a non-electing shareholder. So if there's an exchange or tender offer, or a merger with electable form of payment, you have to exercise your options ahead of the ex date in order to benefit.

I think that's a really good point, but I'm still going to contest it.

Options are derivatives, so they're different from cryptocurrencies, which are themselves analogous to equities. An option inherently has a date of expiration, whereas a cryptocurrency (even a fork) does not intrinsically have such a thing, and with an option you do not own the underlying unless you choose to exercise.

It took me maybe 15-20 seconds to "claim" my BCH from BTC. I don't think its a technical issue here, so not sure why Coinbase would create such a negative situation. Simply provide an input to paste a withdraw wallet address for BCH and everyone can move on.

Even if BCH had only been worth $0.10 people would still want to claim their free money.

I bet it comes down to not wanting to go through the same thing for every fork that gains a little bit of momentum.

If their accounting is competent they can anyway trivially award the correct amount of BCH at any later date (because they'd be able to determine exactly how many BTC each customer had at any given moment).

That's not nice for customers that want to trade now, but people are hardly forever screwed if BCH becomes the new thing.

Even the exchanges that trading is occuring on aren't necessarily allowing users to withdraw their BCC/BCH yet. Kraken say deposits and withdrawals may not be available for several days: https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/892689436109971456 Not sure about ViaBTC and Bittrex.

There's something I don't quite get (being a cryptocurrency newbie). Why can coinbase users not simply import their private key into some other wallet that supports both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?

My understanding is that Bitcoin Cash recognises the old Bitcoin blockchain as their own up to the point of the fork. So as of Aug 1st all Bitcoin balances are Bitcoin Cash balances as well. Or is that not how it works?

Coinbase users don't have a private key for their Coinbase balance. They have an account with Coinbase, and Coinbase has their own private keys for their internal wallets. When you withdraw money from Coinbase, you're asking them to use their private keys to sign a transaction sending bitcoins to an address you specify.

What users could have done was withdraw their Coinbase balance into their own wallet, then they'd have coins on both forks. This had to be done before the fork happened, though. Now that it has, anyone whose coins were in Coinbase at the time of the fork is at the mercy of Coinbase.

Oh, I see. That's unfortunate. Thanks for explaining.

Worth mentioning that they notified users before the fork.

Users of coinbase have no real right to complain because they have given up their control of their bit coin when they sign up for coin base. Unless this wasn't made clear by coin base at the beginning, i don't see how the law suit has any legs.

They're giving up control of their bitcoin for specific purposes. Coinbase can't just do whatever they feel like with it, any more than your bank can one day just declare "Hey, we decided to keep all of your deposits, FOAD, thanks."

may be i'm misunderstanding the nature of the bitcoin fork, but i see it the same as owning foreign currency. IF you banked some US dollars, you can't turn around and say you'd like to get it back out as Euros without paying some kind of exchange rate.

Yeah, that's how I feel about this. It's not coinbase's responsibility to act as a host to all cryptocurrencies.

The article states,

> An activist group, which claims Coinbase's decision is akin to a brokerage withholding new shares from its investors, ...

which is not at all what it's like. Coinbase isn't the only source to buy/sell BCC. I think it's ridiculous that a company could be sued because they don't offer a new service.

That is not the issue at all.

The issue is that Coinbase is _withholding_ the BCC from its customers. Technically, Coinbase has been awarded the BCC for all of the wallets they are in control of, but are refusing to distribute it.

It really is akin to a brokerage refusing to award shares to customers due to a company split/stock split.

It seems clear that Coinbase must have a major fundamental financial problem.

How does that follow?

If Coinbase is actually holding BTC for every claimed BTC of their customers, then it's trivial to calculate how many BCH the customer held at the time of the fork and create a way to claim them or transfer them. It could be a one-time option, if Coinbase doesn't want to deal with BCH.

Unless they aren't holding as much BTC as their customers think they are. In which case, it gets complicated.

They clearly stated, well in advance, through multiple channels, their intention not to support BCC. They specifically told people to take their BTC off CoinBase if they wanted BCC.

I don't think they could have been any clearer.

>well in advance

As a customer, the first notification of this was sent to me was around ten day before the fork, I don't think that would be considered as 'well in advance'.

Doesn't matter. The fork occurred, so they can either give the duplicated amounts to their customers or keep them to themselves and who knows, sell all of the BCC somewhere else for all we know. To me, the latter just seems to be unrightful profit for coinbase.

Does it depend on whether Coinbase is a fiduciary? Gemini, for example, represents that they are[1], but I find no such claim by Coinbase.

Edit: A fiduciary would (AIUI) not be allowed to keep shares from a spinoff, which this seems like. But I'm no expert.

[1] https://gemini24.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204734485-Is-...

>which is not at all what it's like. Coinbase isn't the only source to buy/sell BCC. I think it's ridiculous that a company could be sued because they don't offer a new service.

As it happens, it's slightly more complicated than what you make it out to be. It's not a question of them simply not offering to support the new service. You see, when you hold your bitcoins inside Coinbase they have a private address of your wallet which they don't disclose to you. You can of course withdraw the bitcoins at any time (we'll get back to this later) and transfer them into a wallet of your choice. Now when the fork happens you, as the owner of the private key to your wallet now own the same amount of bitcoins on both blockchains. Both, as it appears have market value. However, because coinbase is the sole entity possessing private keys in this case and because they have announced that they won't support BCC they are effectively pocketing the entire market value of the BCC bitcoins that their customers have entrusted them with, which is likely to be in millions of dollars. When they announced that they wouldn't support BCC a lot of people rushed to withdraw their money from Coinbase into other wallets. However, a lot of people were unable to do so due to a variety of reasons and Coinbase is notorious for having atrocious customer service in matters like this. Hence the outrage.

When you hold your bitcoins inside Coinbase, they aren't part of "your" wallet. Coinbase works like a bank. When you deposit $100, they don't mark those bills as being yours. Instead they are commingled with everyone else and the bank gives you a promise that when you ask for your $100, you'll get your $100 back. Not that if you gave them a $100 bill, you'll get back that exact same bill. Coinbase works exactly the same way. This means that you can transfer Bitcoins between two Coinbase accounts (a) instantly, and (b) without incurring any transaction fees --- because such a transfer doesn't actually go through the blockchain.

BTW, Coinbase and other similar companies claim to be a full reserve bank, but unless there's an audit, there is no way to tell from external observation that they aren't playing a Mt. Gox game of being a fractional reserve bank without bothering to tell their customers.

So how does this relate to BCC/BCH? Since each Bitcoin customer doesn't have their BTC in a separate wallet, in order for Coinbase to support BCH, or any other random fork of Bitcoin that might take place in the future, they would have to track when your BTC was credited to your account, and then create a separate BCH account to track the BCH. Then if you ask to withdraw your BCH in USD, just as you are entitled to do with BTC held in a Coinbase account, Coinbase would have to find an exchange that supports BCH, and sell some number of BCH on your behalf.

Coinbase has elected not to do this, and gave all of their customers ample notice that if they wanted to participate in the BCH experiment, they would have to ask Coinbase to transfer their BTC into their own private wallet. (I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure the fact that they did give notice is going to be something that will be mentioned as part of their defense if and when a lawsuit is actually filed.) When I withdrew all of my BTC from Coinbase last week, the transaction which Coinbase executed to transfer "my" BTC into my own wallet had "change" that went back to a Coinbase private key. That's another clear indication that "my" BTC were not held in a separate wallet, but rather commingled with other Coinbase customers' accounts.

Coinbase gave notice, but some customers probably weren't able to act on it due to withdrawal limits.

How much notice is ample? The email wasn't sent until Jul 27. That's not even one week.

No, when you hold "bitcoins" with Coinbase, Coinbase just marks that down in their MongoDB database. You don't have a Bitcoin wallet on Coinbase at all. Coinbase has various wallets that they'll use in order to honour their MongoDB records of who they owe what.

> Coinbase isn't the only source to buy/sell BCC.

That's not what this is about. They want to withdraw their BCC which duplicated from their BTC.

> I think it's ridiculous that a company could be sued because they don't offer a new service.

I think it's ridiculous if a company, very similar to a bank, couldn't be sued when they effectively haircut their customers of 20% profit of their coins.

I think we're finding out that the coins that Coinbase's customers believe they hold don't actually belong to those customers. It looks like they belong to Coinbase, who is deciding what to do with them. You gotta read the fine print.

It's a good way of looking at it. Another perspective, which makes this issue so complicated, is that we could compare this to: a company on the stock exchange splitting into two companies, investors should be getting shares in both companies, but the brokerage decides they are not going to recognize the second company and thus the investors don't get their shares in the second company.

In practice that's often not how that works, though.

I had a company I have shares in that split in two and they gave me a choice, either convert my shares to the new company or keep them in the existing company. I didn't automatically get shares in the new company and if I opted too I would have lost the shares in the original company.

What company was this? I have literally never heard of a spin off that did not result in a stockholder getting ownership of the parent and spin off, or the stockholder retaining ownership of one company and being paid out for the value of their ownership in the other company.

Was this a publicly traded company?

It's not the most usual mechanism, but it exists: http://www.spinoffresearch.com/spin-off-mechanics/split-offs

Edit: usually (always?) the exchange is preceded by a partial IPO (or a stake in a quoted company exists for some reason) and they are distributing the remaining shares.

Pfizer, although I only owned a few shares so I didn't follow up. Doing some quick searches it seems the spin-off might have been halted.

This really doesn’t make sense, because literally anyone can create an altcoin and declare that the initial holders are as per Bitcoin block 486559, and then fork from there, thus transforming all Bitcoin holders into holders of this altcoin.

From the point of view of Bitcoin, Bitcoin didn’t split; someone made a copy, so the initial balances are inherited from the Bitcoin blockchain.

This isn't Timmy from accounting splitting off from Apple. This is the iPad division splitting off from Apple. If I'm holding Apple stock, I sure as hell expect to end up holding iPad stock in the event of a split.

No, this is the iPad division quitting en masse and starting their own company together. You don't get shares in that.

Okay let's bring this metaphor back around. This is the iPad division quitting and issuing 'iPad' stock to all current owners of Apple stock. But your broker, who is holding your Apple stock on your behalf, is preventing you from collecting your new iPad stock.

If the iPad division quit en masse, formed a new corporation, and gave out free stock to people who could prove ownership of AAPL shares; E-TRADE has no obligation to do extra work with iPad Corp to make this possible…

> a company on the stock exchange splitting into two companies

No, that is not what's happening here: Bitcoin is a consensus network where consensus is achieved essentially by mining sequence of blocks, which requires a huge amount of computational power. Each block have a relation with the previous block. Sometimes two or more blocks are mined almost at the same time (creating a fork), miners then choose one and keep mining as fast as they can. At some point one fork will be longer than the other/s, which is when consensus happen: miners abandon the shortest forks and keep mining on the largest one.

As others have said, it really depends on the value of the fork. If you make a fork worth nothing, nobody's going to care.

But as right now Bitcoin Cash is worth $634 and regular Bitcoin $2727 per coin according to coinmarketcap.com. That's 23% the customers are loosing out on instantly.

And the defense that the users should be responsible to withdraw your coins if you want to keep it on both forks is disingenuous. There are withdrawal limits and requests for raising the limit goes unanswered for months due to high demand. Those users have literally no course of action. Also Coinbase issued their stance on Bitcoin Cash 10 days before the fork, this doesn't leave much leeway for customers on vacation for example.

But there's other cryptocurrencies with a nontrivial market cap out there; Coinbase only supports three. Then there's fiat currency, of which Coinbase's support is also limited.

Again, where do they draw the line?

It's irrelevant if Coinbase supports trading of the coin. What they should do is allow the customers to withdraw their Bitcoin Cash coins.

What other cryptocurrencies have been forked of another coin gaining such a large value, placing the exchanges in the same spot?

I can think of only one: Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The same thing happened there. Coinbase was forced to allow the customers to withdraw their Ethereum Classic coins.

> Again, where do they draw the line?

If a forking chain survives and gains a significant share they should allow withdrawal of their coins. Not keep them, as they are doing now.

The fork has literally existed for 36 hours only.

It is easily too soon to say whether it will survive. You may have read or done technical analysis that came back supporting the conclusion that it will survive, but if Coinbase is taking the position that it won't survive, IMHO it is much too soon to say whether or not the same thing is happening here.

As a matter of fact, this can't be the same thing...

Ethereum Classic was the original chain. Ethereum(') is what the developers answered with, after the famed failure of the DAO, before 28 days had passed and the damage would become irreversible.

If anything, your comparison is reversed, but in my opinion it is nowhere near close to the same thing. Eth Classic tokens are called classic because it was the original chain (with the bug in it, "just like we agreed to," if I understood the story fully.)

> It is easily too soon to say whether it will survive.

I agree. That's why Coinbase should have said that they will wait and see if the fork will survive or not. If Bitcoin Cash continues to have a non trivial value and the fork survives Coinbase will either have to give in and give the customers their Bitcoin Cash or they will get sued and loose.

> Ethereum Classic was the original chain. Ethereum(') is what the developers answered with, after the famed failure of the DAO, before 28 days had passed and the damage would become irreversible.

It doesn't really matter which chain was the original. After the fork Ethereum(') became Ethereum and only after the fact did the Ethereum Classic movement begin (as you say).

> If anything, your comparison is reversed

Majority hash power and the market decides the "real" coin. Ethereum and Bitcoin are the real chains and Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash are the spinoffs/altcoins.

The fact is Coinbase weren't going to credit the customers their Ethereum Classic, but had to give in. I see history repeating itself.

Well, BCC has about 13 blocks on their chain in 24 hours. I understand there's a technical reason for the delays, but if you thought Bitcoin Classic had a problem with transaction delays, BCC absolutely still has yet to prove it can even remotely help with that.

I welcome the diversity, and a chain that has lower difficulty will be most welcome for miners as well. Hearing about some of the issues with withdrawal limits, I will not be surprised if there is a lawsuit against CoinBase. I'm personally just glad to see that, on the Bitcoin price graph, this whole event has so far been a complete non-event. (Even though I sold mine before the Hard Fork. I'm betting on ETH.)

That's a good balanced view.

Note that the difficulty will be reduced, to about 20%, after the next 6 blocks. So the transaction delays should resolve themselves during the next 12-24 hours or so.

They should quit representing themselves as bank holding your coins/private keys, which is not what they are doing. They are issuing IOUs for a certain amount on a particular blockchain. It would be more honest to be explicit about this in their marketing and website copy, and would avoid this problem, but that's not sexy and doesn't get VC funding. I have no sympathy for their plight.

When you put your fiat currency into a traditional bank, the bank doesn't hold it for you either. They also issue IOUs.

Coinbase is more similar to a bank than it is to a wallet.

Well, if you want to extend the analogy...

Let's say that JimBob came along offering a lollipop to everyone for every $1000 they could prove they held in a US bank on a particular day. (The BCH network is offering credits to everyone on the BTC network in proportion to how much BTC they can prove they had on a particular day.)

You, as a customer, tell your bank, "yes, confirm to JimBob that I had $30,000 in my account on that day!" (You provide notarized authorization, etc.) The bank says no. Would that fly? Maybe.

Instead, they call up JimBob and say, "Look, we have $3 million in our bank vault. Give us our 3,000 lollipops."

Would that fly? I don't think so. (Though Coinbase hasn't done that last part ... yet.)

Well, really, the problem is that JimBob is in total control of the interaction here. Maybe your bank says, "Sure, here's an affidavit showing you had $30,000 on date X", but that's not good enough for JimBob; he needs to see the actual, physical bills and needs proof that _those specific bills_ were in your bank's vault at the time.

This process puts a fair amount of burden on the "bank", because they need to deal with JimBob's byzantine lollipop claims process _directly_ with their own cash, rather than issuing a standard affidavit that'll work equally well for MarySue's pop-tart claims process. Or, in more technical terms, _every time_ anyone comes up with a new coin, coinbase would have to dust off the cold vault, generate the proofs of ownership, reassign them to the new owners, then move the bitcoin over into newly generated cold addresses to restore the security posture of the cold vault coins.

Moreover, creating new types of altcoins is a process that can be easily automated, and at little cost to whoever is instigating this creation process. Of course, most of these coins won't ever gain any popularity or value - but then what's the threshold? At what level of popularity does a broker need to do anything? What happens if a coin is totally unpopular initially but gains popularity later - do brokers need to backfill? What if the key material has been rotated away and destroyed in the meantime?

For that matter, how do we measure popularity? Volume? It's easy to spam volume if you control the first exchange for your altcoin. Market cap? It's easy to fake market cap and unrealized gains when nobody can transfer coins yet. Hashrate? Who knows when that'll settle down. In any case, it's not the sort of thing that can really be objectively determined too quickly after a split.

These don't become an issue with normal securities because, in normal stock market securities there is only one authorized issuer who is able to issue splits, and this issuer incurs real, significant administrative costs for doing so. They also must involve credentialed third parties, and all participants face regulatory scrutiny, fines, or even jail time if they deliberately set out to abuse the system.

Compare to the creation of an altcoin, where the costs of creating a new altcoin are tiny, but the costs of dealing with the fallout by brokers can be quite large. And, of course, there is effectively zero regulation that would give penalties to deliberate abusers. There's therefore a large cost and risk imbalance between altcoin creators and brokers who have to deal with the new altcoins. This sort of cost/risk imbalance results in, effectively, a sort of denial of service threat against bitcoin brokers if it's allowed to stand.

For this reason, the precedent set by this split is going to be of great importance in the future of bitcoin and altcoin brokers - if brokers must deal with splits, it will mean that they will need to segregate coins and keep them online ("hot") at all times in order to be able to deal with any split immediately and/or retroactively. This in turn will hurt the security posture of these currencies substantially. The risk of screwing a split up will also hang over any service that holds *-coins on behalf of their customers or other third parties.

This will also impact the legal feasibility of off-chain transaction aggregation schemes (e.g. lightning) not feasible, as there's no guarantee that the next harebrained altcoin split will be able to deal with redeeming the complex transaction scripts involved with e.g. an unsettled lightning channel - and if it doesn't, who is liable?

So, in short, _requiring_ brokerages to deal with altcoin splits and redemptions opens up a huge legal can of worms that is probably best left closed, for the viability of the overall altcoin landscape. Yes, it sucks that coinbase didn't do something for this particularly public split, but if they did they'd have to be processing splits every other day, or perhaps even more frequently.

Disclaimer: I have no position, long or short, in bitcoin or any other similar "altcoin" assets, nor do I have any plans to open such a position in the forseeable future. However, I do find it fascinating to watch this legal/economic experiment evolve from a safe distance.

That's a lot of text that dances around the problem. Wouldn't the issue be solved if exchanges just offer IOUs for a particular chain instead of claiming to be a "wallet" or "bank" holding your asset? If they want to claim they are holding a user's "coins" (which is a misnomer to be honest and is an inaccurate representation of how blockchains work), then they better have a particular address and private key somewhere for ever user that holds assets on their exchange.

Well, the problem is that this means exchanges need to actually implement support for every chain. If I tomorrow go muck around with my bitcoin node and make it fork, why shouldn't they be required to issue you IOUs for that altcoin as well, after all? What if they didn't know that a fork happened, went and rotated all their cold storage keys, destroyed the old private keys, and later you ask for your coins on the secret chain?

You have to draw the line somewhere, and, as a practical concern, determining that a fork meets this line retroactively adds a great deal of complexity and risk to the process. Further, as we've seen here, even a short delay in executing the split raises a great deal of ire and threats of lawsuits.

So, as I see it, the only consistent positions to take would be to either:

1. Not require split tracking at all. People who want to enjoy the benefits of such a split can simply move their bitcoins to a wallet under their direct control, or to an exchange who has agreed to track the split. [what happened here - a market-driven solution, essentially]

2. To legally mandate split tracking if proponents of the split agree to make a market - that is, agree to buy at a particular price for a particular period of time - thus ensuring that the coins have value [unlikely to ever come into play due to the enormous cost of such a venture]

3. To legally mandate split tracking for absolutely every altcoin, no matter how awkward or technically difficult it may be to do so.

Keep in mind that implementing 3 means the exchange might need to run software created by the altcoin's promoters - because keeping up with your own software for every altcoin would take too much development resources - and would be exposed to the exchange's private keys in order to perform hot wallet transactions that the altcoin's network will accept. Thus, if exchanges are forced to run software from any random Joe's fork, this would present a real security risk that backdoored software might be slipped in - this means that they would be forced to switch to split wallets by customer so a single customer using JoeCoin won't compromise funds held by other customers, but having this split out makes maintaining cold wallets impractical.

> Well, the problem is that this means exchanges need to actually implement support for every chain

No, read my comment again, carefully. If they are providing IOUs for BTC, that means there is no private key associated with the debt. If say for instance they owe a user 10 BTC, they could give them any 10 BTC. if a new chain pops up, it doesn't matter, because the contract is explicitly an IOU for 10 BTC, not BCH or BCC.

the problem arises when the exchange implies they are holding "your coins" for you like a safe deposit box, which means there's a private key associated with the coins, and thus that key would work with any chain splits, including BCH/BCC.

just curious, do you understand how blockchains work? i.e. private keys and the transaction protocol? if you weren't familiar with it, then that would explain why you are having a hard time understanding my comment.

I think I misread your comment - I had interpreted it as suggesting that exchanges should be required to issue IOUs for new forked assets, which has serious practical issues.

Of course, saying that coinbase balances are IOUs for bitcoins is basically what happened here, and apparently people aren't happy about it. While you could change the marketing material, I don't think it would do much to change the outrage in this case; I very much doubt people will pay attention to such a nuance when they apparently couldn't be bothered to temporarily withdraw their coins.

> I very much doubt people will pay attention to such a nuance when they apparently couldn't be bothered to temporarily withdraw their coins.

That's a very good point. It would avoid any legal ambiguity and save face with the more technical minded though.

Then how about this: JimBob constructed a perfect copy of everyone's bank safety deposit box key and its contents, including the keyhole[1]. The contents of the copy are free for the taking if you can open it with the key.

Your bank happens to have an access control policy where they hold the safety deposit box key for you and you have to pick it up from them each time (after authenticating).

You ask the bank for your key so can go to the JimBob version and get your copied stuff. They refuse because of a security policy about taking keys offsite.

You offer to close the box account and take your (original) stuff out so that there will be no security compromise. They refuse because that would compromise the box and cost them a usable one.

You offer to pay for the cost of replacing the box with an uncompromised one. They still refuse.

That is the position that Coinbase is in. (Users haven't offered to pay for the replacement of the private keys that coinbase uses, but this is a trivial cost, and establishes the barrier that prevents coinbase from facing unbounded costs to deal with every fork.)

EDIT: And for an analogy that favors "Coinbase doesn't owe you anything": Assume we're under a gold standard. Assume that some goldsmiths just give you regular dollar bills as your warehouse receipt "since they're redeemable with the government banks anyway". Most people don't care much about the difference, but each goldsmith keeps a list of the serial numbers they gave out so they don't have to honor arbitrary demands.

Then (of course) the government goes off the gold standard. But some goldsmiths are like, "no, that's BS, we will still honor your claims, just bring us a dollar bill that's on our serial number list". So there's a mad dash to get dollar bills that were used as goldsmith receipts, and some people ask for their deposits back from their bank, but the bank (like Coinbase) insists that they only have to give you banknotes of their choice, not the original ones you deposited, which was all they ever promised.

(Modified scenario: you kept the dollar bills from the goldsmith in a safety deposit box, and the bank replaces them with new dollars and never redeems them for gold.)

[1] You can further assume that the copy is some debased, lower value version of arbitrary percentage and it doesn't affect the analogy.

You are latching onto the wrong aspect of my comment. Remove the word "bank" from my comment and it still makes sense.

Other cryptocurrencies don't share the original blockchain with bitcoin.

Which is better because the original blockchain rewarded the majority of bitcoins to very low difficulty early adopters running nothing more then a 3GHz CPU. Why would you want to keep an old blockchain and keep raising the difficulty? Why not keep the difficulty high and announce the date of the new chain without premining? Because it's a ponzi scheme, and it's easy to hide behind the technical jargon and hype propaganda that all the speculators are publishing.

Thousands of other BTC was rewarded to protocol hackers who exploited the empty block rewards and submitted useless "Proof of Work" to the network. Mining pools have also reaped plenty of bitcoins on the "original blockchain" by manipulating their stance as overseers of a vast swath of the mining activity in the network where they could simply prioritize their transactions and rewards over the slaves in their mining pool.

This is not even mentioning the inherent slowness and susceptibility to ASIC attacks, and overall antiquated design of both BTC and BCC network designs.

You have no idea what you're talking about, your argument is not even coherent, it's just a bunch of talking points stringed together.

As I explained, the reason Bitcoin Cash situation is different is because the blockchain / private keys are shared. It's not the case with the altcoins. That's why Coinbase is in the wrong.

Plus it would cost them very little to fix the situation, compared to how much of the users' money they are holding.

> That's 23% the customers are loosing out on instantly.

That's not even remotely true. Right now there are zero exchanges that support depositing BCH. The only BCH that are trading are the ones that were created by the exchanges.

So unless you're arguing that Coinbase should be liable for not creating an exchange for BCH then the argument that anyone has lost out on money has zero merit. Even if Coinbase had already given everyone BCH, no one would have been able to sell on any exchange.

As I said, that's measured using coinmarketcap and of course the exact value is only speculation. But it's currently far from negligible.

> So unless you're arguing that Coinbase should be liable for not creating an exchange for BCH then the argument that anyone has lost out on money has zero merit.

That's only with the assumption that no exchanges will ever allow BCH deposits, that you cannot sell them OTC nor buy things with it.

Not to mention 80% of the hash power seems to be controlled by one entity. They could roll back tx arbitrarily.

There was a hint that customers should withdraw their BTC from Coinbase before the split and (if they want to) move it back afterwards; the people that are suing knew this, and knew that Coinbase wasn't going to support it (at first), and yet kept their BTC hosted in Coinbase's wallets.

With withdrawal limits being what they are, this is easier said than done for a lot of users, I'd guess.

Was their any actual limit to moving Bitcoins held in Coinbase to another wallet/software? If there are why is it a problem now and not always?

Yes, Coinbase limits BTC withdrawals based on current USD value. A lot of traders lost money because they couldn't get their funds out in time. Coinbase will likely get sued and it'll cost them.

No not witdrawals. Is there a Coinbase imposed limit to how many Bitcoins I can send to another wallet? And was that recently implemented?

Coinbase certainly has conversion limits, but anyone that wanted their Bitcoin into Dollars knew about this limit far before the warning of Coinbase only supporting one side of the split, and converting into Dollars means you don't want to risk the split and you should have been diversifying far before Coinbases announcement.

>Is there a Coinbase imposed limit to how many Bitcoins I can send to another wallet?

"Sending to another wallet" IS a withdrawal.

Yes. Coinbase calls BTC transfers withdrawals, and it screwed me over a lot when I found that out.

OK, good to know I was just having issues with the terminology.

I think the limit the other commenters are mentioning are only for moving bitcoins out of GDAX, their exchange. I don't think there is a limit to how much you can withdraw from a wallet directly on coinbase not on the exchange

You can't be released from liability for doing something stupid and harmful just by warning people that you're about to do something stupid and harmful.

Except they did not do anything stupid and harmful. They just did not do something clever and beneficial for customers.

I disagree, but it doesn't really matter for this: either way, the fact that they told people ahead of time doesn't change things.

> Except they did not do anything stupid and harmful.

Okay, fine. They "gave customers a 10 day ultimatum, at which time they said they would forfeit the Bitcoin Cash because it's unsupported."

You can't do that. It doesn't matter if it's technically complicated to implement a disbursement system, it doesn't matter if anyone can decide to fork a cryptocurrency. A customer's asset cannot be denied to them (potentially, and as originally stated, into perpetuity) with 10 days notice. This is not how any exchange operates, and the fact that Coinbase is attempting to do it is beyond the pale.

I had no idea that things worked this way until I read this thread. It was not clear in the slightest from what the exchanges were saying that the fork would entitle me to another currency.

I transferred things from a private wallet INTO coinbase quite literally on 21:00 on 7/31 because there was absolutely zero indication from them that this was a bad idea - just that they didn't support some new alt coin.

You know what would have been responsible would be to own up and explain it:

"After the fork private wallet holders will have both currencies so you should remove your coins from coinbase before the fork, then put them back in"

Is that bad for business? Yep; too fucking bad. Coinbase holds the forked coins right now - all of them - privately. They just aren't giving them to customers. They're just another crooked exchange.

That's exactly what they did say.

> If you wish to have access to UAHF coins or you wish to have immediate access to your bitcoin, you should send your bitcoin from Coinbase to your external address by July 31.

I received this from then on the 19th, and again twice more before the fork.

Forgive me but I still have no idea what that means. What's a UAHF coin? Why would I have access to them? How is the process of moving the coins at all related?

The connection between UAHF and bitcoins is not established nor is the entitlement of getting UAHF coins via a bitcoin private wallet.

Given that explanation, I don't know what they are, how to get them, where they come from, how it applies to me or why I should care. It sounds profoundly irrelevant.

Besides, those forked coins still exist, and I know who has them. It's not that they aren't supporting it, they decided to keep them for themselves. All that obtuse language is just legal CYA.

They just did a hustle. A wall-street white-collar style one, but a hustle nonetheless. I'm not getting them no matter what happens because they're probably already sold.

I imagine the line gets drawn at a certain value. If Bitcoin Cash were trading at two cents a coin, this wouldn't be happening. Your fork would probably be at that end of things.

Exactly. Coinbase should have learned from Ethereum Classic and just announced a general policy. If a fork ends up with a certain volume and certain % of the original over a certain amount of time (to avoid someone inflating the stats temporarily), then Coinbase will support at least withdrawals. They can cap it to a month/year/whatever after the fork so it's not an indefinite issue they need to deal with.

By doing that, uncertainty is eliminated, people can keep their coins on Coinbase knowing if they're worth anything serious, then they'll be fine. Zero downside.

As I mentioned in another comment, no lines would need to be drawn if they didn't advertise themselves as holding your wallet/coins/private keys. If their website and marketing copy were direct about the truth, which is that you are a holder of an IOU for a particular chain, then there would be no problems.

it's a common refrain that you don't actually own your coins if you are not the sole holder of the private keys, and this is one example as to why.

Coinbase doesn't advertise itself as a service for Bitcoin Cash or having anything to do with it. They've never promised it, said it in marketing materials, etc.

You totally ignored my point. I said nothing about Bitcoin Cash.

How about draw the line at a dollar value. Say ten dollars per coin. It's actually a pretty simple issue to solve.

How do you determine the dollar value if there aren't solid exchanges where people are buying and selling the coin?

Over the past month there have been several airdrops to bitcoin holders based on snapshots of bitcoin's blockchain.

Stellar Lumens had an airdrop

Byteball had an airdrop

and there are many more, let alone bitcoin forks. These are all very valuable for holders, and people that own their private key.

There are several problems for exchanges, and it doesn't make sense for them to bake that kind of functionality in until a legal framework forces them too. In which case, yes the customer SHOULD sue, thats the only way to progress this. But the old adage is that if you don't control your private keys you don't have any control. And unless the exchanges start providing access to these airdrops as if they are dividends for holding, then it will be a very complex issue for them.

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.

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!

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

There is also nothing preventing exchanges from dumping "your" BTC for cash from a pure technical standpoint.

Because technically, all you have is the promise of the exchange to transfer you the right amount of BTC out of your account whenever you request them, or the same market value in another (supported) crypto/fiat currency. This is not only a pinky-swear promise but one protected by some laws and contracts.

But it is very questionable to me if there is (or should be) any obligation for any exchange to pay you any amount of BCC that magically appeared overnight.

Exchanges don't keep a real BTC wallet for each user. When one Coinbase user sends funds to another, the transaction is entirely virtual (which lets them avoid paying the network transaction fee).

I'm aware of this, but they should still have enough BTC in storage to cover the BTC in all accounts. This means they should also have BCC for each user.

That's an assumption that may or may not be true. Is there any reason why Coinbase could not be operating on a fractional reserve? Or, if we want to consider Coinbase as managing a discrete asset instead of managing deposits... Shorting stocks "loans" out a stock that technically belongs to someone else; there two "positive owners" and one "negative owner" until the position is covered. So they can also operate on a fractional reserve.

You are correct. However, Coinbase does state that they simply store the funds:

"Customer deposits are not sent anywhere. Unlike other financial institutions, we do not lend out customer funds. 100% of your funds are securely stored."

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/667213...

This, I believe, is the basis of the unjust enrichment claim. Coinbase technically owns the BTC in its wallets, and you can bet even though they aren't supporting it, they are receiving the associated BCC. They just aren't passing it on to the beneficial owners (their clients).

Would that not only become relevant if BCC were to become more valuable (say in USD) than BTC? As of now, Coinbase is sitting on the fence basically (just like everyone else who holds their own private key and hasn't made a transaction since the fork). They can decide to use their (users') coins on either blockchain but not on both.

So what Coinbase has is similar to a call option on BCC.

> They can decide to use their (users') coins on either blockchain but not on both.

Please stop saying this. Read your own grandparent comment:

> There is no "conversion", it is free money for all BTC holders. Everyone who owned BTC, now owns BTC+BCC.

It isn't possible to spend BTC on the BCC blockchain, because coins spent on the BCC blockchain are BCC by definition. Once you've spent your BCC on the BCC blockchain, you still have your BTC on the BTC blockchain; that's what a fork means.

I see what you mean. That's pretty amazing. Thanks for explaining.

I would have expected the two forks to coordinate sufficiently to make sure double spending is not possible. But I see how this would have been extremely difficult if not impossible without one of these two rival camps agreeing to be the opt-in network while the other one remains the default.

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.

how is the price established?

answered my own question:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

some exchanges support it.

The delay in mining was required to trigger drastic difficulty reduction (20%). More details at https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adju...

I'm confused. You're saying that the delay was intentional?

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-adjust...

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.

It's not very decentralized. According to 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.

Less than 12 hours.

My bad, thanks. I was looking at median time instead of timestamp.

Block monitors for BitcoinCash https://cash.coin.dance/ https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/

The popular press are crypto-illiterate.

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.)

Wait a minute, what? How can Kraken claim to have a BCH/BTC market if you can’t deposit BCH and sell them?

For BTC they already hold pre-fork.

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-a...

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.

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... :(

A short is just a loan and a contract. If you can find your own counterparty, you might be able to do it.

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

Sufficient guarantees are just a contract. The result is the same either way if something goes wrong -- you take the counterparty to court.

In this case, by "sufficient guarantees" I meant the automation of exchanges, where you need to have collateral to trade on margin, and the lender is automatically repaid (unless something goes very wrong) without courts.

So then write a contract that requires collateral. This is what escrow exists for.

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

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.

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.]

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.

I'll add to this that Coinbase freezing everyone's Bitcoin Cash is a great example of the problems with giving up decentralization.

Coinbase warned people for a month that they wouldn't support Bitcoin Cash.

I thought they made the announcement 10 days before the fork, not a month.

I'm not sure why you are saying this as if you're defending Coinbase. Warning someone you're going to seize their assets a month in advance doesn't make it any better for them when their assets get seized.

I'm not saying Coinbase is somehow ethically wrong for doing this, I'm saying that one benefit of decentralization is that no one can seize your assets.

And then muddying the waters is the argument that larger blocks are going to centralize it because poorer people won't be able to run a full node in their homes. (Versus paying $10 for a VPS to do so.) Conveniently ignoring that no one wants to run a full node for a settlement layer between big financial companies.

But further screwing it up is ASICBoost, which isn't compatible with other proposals like Segwit. That allows the small block folks to accuse the miners of opposing changes only for financial gain.

Sure, something needs to give. A transaction is about 225 bytes for the common case. So doing even 1000/sec means around 1.8Mbps (plus overhead) just to get the flow of transactions.

> So doing even 1000/sec means around 1.8Mbps (plus overhead) just to get the flow of transactions.

Huh, maybe we should come up with a cryptocurrency where you are awarded new blocks for the storage and bandwidth you contribute to the effort, rather than for how many hashes you can calculate per second.

After all, if we're hoping to handling transactions on the scale of Visa, and we don't like centralization, we need to think about decentralized storage of all that information sooner or later. SegWit might not be the perfect answer, but you can't keep requiring everyone to store every transaction that ever happened. We need a solution that is both distributed and publicly verifiable. Something like IPFS comes to mind.

And in order to incentivize people to contribute storage and bandwidth, there would have to be a way to reward those who do so. I think this would be much more useful than the current situation where we basically reward people for wasting a lot of energy.

They don't need to store everything. All that's needed is the list of addresses and balances (UTXOs), and the last few blocks. A hash chain of 10 years of 10 minute blocks is only a few MB, so it should be something we can distribute reliably. UTXOs are a couple GB but will grow.

There are no balances in bitcoin. It's all deltas.

But, now you have a stateful application running in the cloud, vs an immutable blockchain. And that implicitly means you are now trusting authoritative nodes to hold that state. This is basically moving closer and closer to just a bunch of nodes running a database with some consensus mechanism, rather than an actual blockchain.

(I'm not personally sold that this is actually a distinction that matters - after all, we are already implicitly trusting "authoritative nodes" to deliver the blockchain, and the same mechanism that prevents alteration of the blockchain right now would also prevent altering the database state. Namely, that nobody else is going to accept the version of history where I own infinity bitcoins, regardless of how we record that state.)

A middle ground might be to have the full state available to nodes that want to verify, but also implement a "checkpoint/epoch" mechanism on top for "fast clients" who aren't overly concerned about a massive concerted-but-silent attack on Bitcoin escaping notice.

It's not THAT hard to run a full node, even with 32MB blocks. But for people that want to kickstart a local node, they don't need the entire history if there's a trusted checkpoint mechanism. So they can participate, validate new blocks coming in, while they never or slowly download the historical blockchain.

A hash chain of every block is only a few MB so it's not that big of a deal to make sure the chain is immutably stored.

> It's not THAT hard to run a full node, even with 32MB blocks.

Not at present, but if you increase the block size then you ramp that up pretty fast. Let's say there's a block every 9 minutes (nominally 10 but the network is reactive to increased hash power so it's a bit less in reality). That's 58400 blocks per year, which with a 32 MB block size would translate to 1,868,800 MB per year.

A growth rate of 2 TB per year would very quickly take you past the point where "anyone can have a copy". Yes, it would still be feasible for power-users who could dedicate a whole HDD or some NAS space to it, but that's implicitly conceding the whole "anybody can have a copy" point, and the growth would still be continuing unabated.

And the problem is - Bitcoin's transaction rate is currently so slow that 32 MB is not really a big enough block size. Going from 7 tx/sec to 224 tx/sec is still pitiful for a global network, again Visa does 50k tx/sec at peak.

I agree that it seems highly plausible that some form of "checkpointing" mechanism could be securely implemented.

In fact if you "trust the network" then there's no reason to download the blockchain at all, you can run the Electrum client. And if you think all the nodes are lying to you... how do you ever get the blockchain securely in the first place, regardless of a checkpoint mechanism?

Power users that could dedicated a $50 drive? Storage just keeps getting cheaper. Bandwidth is more likely to be a limiting factor. But looking at dedicated servers, $50/mo gets you 8TB of disk + plenty of bandwidth.

Checkpointing cannot be hard. The hashes of 58400 blocks is not even 2MB. So with a few dozen megs you can checkpoint every single block. Then you can download blocks on-demand if you need to find particular transactions or whatever. What is really lost if we tossed the previous blocks after a year and just kept balances?

But you're right: who needs to run a node?

> Bitcoin main, on the other hand, is moving toward SegWit, which introduces third-party middlemen.

SegWit does not introduce third party middlemen. SegWit is just a different way to calculate the transaction hash that needs to be signed, such that it doesn’t include the signature script. This was arguably the way it should have been all along, since the signature script itself isn’t signed (it contains the signature). This means bypassers can modify it without invalidating the modified transaction (if they don’t touch the actual signature data but only add e.g. a NO_OP opcode).

I don't see how segwit is giving up decentralization at all. Decentralization isn't binary. There will be many many providers that can offer more streamlined and user friendly access to bitcoin. That's decentralization. You will still have the option of interacting with the blockchain directly. That's decentralization.

You are confusing Segwit with Lightning network. Segwit is just a version that optimizes transactions. It's an extension of an unused opcode from the previous version, allowing previous nodes to view Segwit blocks as compatible, therefore only requiring a "soft-fork." Pro-Segwit people tend to be pro-Lightning, since it is not feasible to validate Visa-scale transactions in such an inefficient, centralized manner. This camp views Bitcoin more as a user-controlled store of value/bank account, still requiring a hierarchy of processors to handle day-to-day transactions.

You confused Segwit with Lightning Network. Segwit only helps to enable Lightning Network. It is not required for LN.

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.

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).

> 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.

You were also smaller when you were younger...

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...

Thanks for sharing this thought. I was just thinking something somewhat similar..

I didn't participate (and am still not participating) in the cryptocurrency movement, for no particular reason.

Watching it from the outside, it's fascinating to see how a value system that seems built virtually on the backs of processing power and technology, essentially has ended up mirroring so many challenges and raising so many issues that resemble or relate to the modern finance system.

There's probably enough going on here to last many PhDs many lifetimes!

So much so, that the tinfoil hat part of me almost wonders if Bitcoin was a grand experiment by the creator(s), to both show the fallacy of the financial systems we depend on, while simultaneously showing a new and different alternative.

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.

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.

Perhaps you would like to switch to my exchange? http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com

Bitcoin sex change? Are you affiliated with expert sex change?

I don't trust a site named bitcoin sex change

You can trust it. Its homepage has 3 columns full of text.

Not really. They should have taken a clear, objective stance, one they could apply to all forks. Like, if the volume of the fork reaches X and the value over 7 days is at least Y% then within 30 days we will offer withdrawals. That way fewer people would have made withdrawals from Coinbase before the fork, and fewer people could claim bad faith on Coinbase part.

If BCC keeps up at least 10% of BTC price, I'm guessing Coinbase will end up at least doing withdrawals.

I got an email plenty early this month that seemed to have a clear stance applicable to forks in general: withdraw my bitcoins before the fork if I wanted altcoins from any fork.

What date was 'early'? I didn't get the email until 4 days prior to the fork.

And this makes perfect sense. If they didn't do this every wallet of BTC would be completely duplicated. This forking thing doesn't make sense, BCH should essentially be a fresh blockchain, there is no reason to build on top of the accumulation of BTC transactions. The only value there is of keeping the existing chain is if BTC fails, then exchanges could begin honoring BTC wallets that exist on the BCH chain. But that even sounds like it's open to scamming/manipulation.

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?

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.

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.

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."

Best case scenario is they handle it the same way they handled ETH/ETC fork.

I don't agree with what Coinbase did, but that's because not all forks are equivalent. Hashing power (necessary for transactions to clear) and trading price are not fuzzy and make a fork legitimate. It's only because BCC has both (at least so far) that I'd argue Coinbase has an obligation to disburse BCC to holders of BTC at the time of the fork.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree. Frankly I'm shocked it even got this far. Who on Coinbase's legal team gave the okay for such an insane directive? You can't just give customers a 10 day ultimatum to withdraw their funds or forfeit them. An exchange in the public market that attempted that would be sued into oblivion.

Furthermore how are they getting by on their justification? You don't need to allow trading for new cryptocurrencies to be disbursable. You just need to send them to customers.

People with Coinbase accounts effectively had an IOU in the amount of X BTC.

After the fork, people with Coinbase accounts still have an IOU in the amount of X BTC.

What funds were lost?

Are you claiming that if I owed someone X BTC before the fork, I owe them both X BTC and X BCH afterward?

Or, bitcoin cash will crash before lawsuits are filed and people stop worrying about their missing 0.1%.

Seems somewhat unlikely after the surprisingly high rates BCH has been trading in past 36 hours (currently at ~16%), but wanted to point out the third possibility.

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?

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.)

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?

Syncing the blockchain is optional, unless you store your coins in a wallet generated by a full node. Even then, things such as UTXO commitments would make syncing the current state almost instantaneous, though it would either requiring pulling the commitment from multiple third parties or having the protocol updated to require a UTXO commitment every Nth block.

I thought the protocol required you to have the keys in hand while scanning the block chain, in order to be sure that all addresses that were generated with your keys can be recovered.

I don't know how I reconcile that with clients like electrum, is that using an implementation of UTXO? Does this just keep a record of any unspent transaction outputs at any given time, scan them, and try your keys on all of them?

I think you can do a similar trick with bitcoin core if you have all of the blocks, but you have a new wallet.dat. You can delete the index and it will regenerate it with the new wallet in mind, recovering all of your unspent transactions.

(You do not need to literally download all of the blocks again, unless you actually don't have them anymore. It is sufficient to rescan them. But this takes time too, and it does require that you must store a copy of the chain somewhere on an ongoing basis.)

What was your goal in downloading the entire chain versus using a light client? Or why didn't you just download the last few blocks plus UTXOs? Either way you need a trust anchor, so starting from something recent makes sense if you don't want to wait days to verify the entire chain.

And if you need to view specific blocks or transactions, use an online viewer or download that specific block and check the hash of the block. 10 years of 10 minute blocks is only 16MB of hashes (32 bytes per block). So it's trivial to get all block hashes and then freely use other sources to check specific parts.

Storage is cheap. 2TB drives are a bit over $50.

I had a wallet.dat from a regular Core client, full node. I wasn't able to find a client that seemed to be able to import that wallet.dat. If you know a way to handle that, great! I don't know if I'd trust some arbitrary client to still be around and maintained when I need to retrieve my funds from the latest version of the block chain. I'm marginally afraid of what will happen if the person maintaining Electrum died, or disappeared, and protocol changes made a need for some mandatory code updates. Because the appearance to me is that private keys may be technically portable, but wallets are basically not transferrable between different clients.

I have a 14TB array that I bought with those Bitcoin I cashed in. It was cheap. But the next time I want to sync the whole chain, I'm really sure I'm gonna have to use it...

Thanks for your comments though, I will look up UTXO as it's another one I have not heard of before!

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transferring_coins_from_Bitcoin-Q...

Yep.

> Before reading this page, users should note that directly manipulating ECDSA private keys is dangerous and can result in losing bitcoins[1][2].

Hmm.

> Use the dumpprivkey command to get the private key. Repeat for as many bitcoin addresses as have money in them.

OK, so how many bitcoin addresses do I have with money in them? examining 3.5 year old wallet.dat, checking Oh, THAT Many? And are you sure that is all of them? (It was quite a lot of addresses, and not sure how I would know if the listing was complete.)

So, is there some way to safely automate this? Try it... the command outputs are all in JSON (configurable?), so you most likely won't be solving this with just pipes, awk, and grep. I tried exporting a few private keys this way and they are not exaggerating when they say:

> This guide is [not] for the impatient or time-stressed, it is recommended that users of Bitcoin Core simply wait out the blockchain synchronization. There are many benefits to running a Full node including trustlessness, security and privacy which lightweight wallets cannot match.

I have to use Bitcoin-Qt to get the keys out, and it does not appear to be fool-proof at all. Might as well just sync the whole blockchain then.

8 MB blocks = 1.15GB per day, or 420GB per year. Sure it might be feasible to run a node if you're in a first world country with fast internet and cheap storage (cost of living wise), but even in rural america, 34.5GB is a significant chunk of bandwidth. Not to mention they eventually plan to raise it to 32MB, which works out to 4.6GB a day or 1.63TB/year.

As if people in the third world have money for transaction fees, opening and closing lightning channels, and of course locking up funds to use the channel.

The idea that bitcoin can exist only as a settlement layer is a dream. It was pitched as something you can buy a cup of coffee with. Now the core team wants to call that a "spam transaction". Yeah right. Time to fire Core.

>Time to fire Core

it's open source, there's no one to "fire". if you're not happy with it, fork it like bitcoin cash did.

You don't need to run a full node to send/receive Bitcoin/BCC though.

see my reply to MichaelGG.

The second line of that reply is incomplete, FYI.

1 gb ~ 2 hours 15 minutes of 1 mbps. 1 tb ~ 3 "mbps months". You need ~ 100mbit to do 1 tb in 24h. (These number are probably underestimating protocol overhead a bit).

So for those people they can use a light client or run a node online. What is their benefit to running a full node?

Not to mention, if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain. Plus the enjoyment of running a full node is greatly reduced if you're just seeing settlement data between large payment systems.

>So for those people they can use a light client or run a node online. What is their benefit to running a full node?

being able to fully verify the blockchain and the transactions. sure, if all you care about is making a payment you can use a SPV client or even a webwallet, but being able to not r

>if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain

that's what the lightning network is for. in which case you don't even need the huge blocks.

This whole pipe dream of little Jimmy running his full Bitcoin node on a raspberry pi in order to protect against the big bad bankers/government/whatever was never based in reality. Bitcoin was always destined to end up centralized. Either in the form of powerful companies controlling it (development, Lightning Network, etc) or large concentrated groups of miners.

Whichever path it ends up going down, centralization is guaranteed.

Well, there's a large middle ground between "little Jimmy's raspi's 4GB sdcard' and 'VISA's multi-PB datacenter'.

While there is certainly centralization pressure on mining, I do not agree that 8MB blocks make it impossible for everyone except for 'powerful companies' to run a full node, especially a pruned one. An enthusiastic early adoptor or investor holding, say, $100k of the token is more than capable of spending $500/yr to run a colo'd node. Would they prefer to spend $0 and host it at home? Probably. But the expense of a high-end VPS or low-end colo box is not totally prohibitive. We're not talking about more than a few rack units worth of HW.

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.

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.

If there's no practical way to sell bitcoin cash, where does the $700 valuation come from?

Demand to trade them, but it could all come crashing down like an overpriced IPO.

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)

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.

At the moment, there are relatively few exchanges where you can trade BCH, and the only BCH on those exchanges is that which was distributed by the exchange itself during the split - as there is no way to move BCH for now.

On the other way, people who want to buy BCH can move their money to those few exchanges, and inflate the bubble, hoping in the greater fool. Ergo, the $700 prices.

I sold for $740 on Kraken exchange, which is pretty big. They credited all BTC accounts with equal amount of BCH and allowed trading right away.

You know you're in the minority; most of the demand are those who didn't have BTC on Kraken. Good for you for cashing out before the flood :-)

Yes, if you find a willing buyer to hand you over the cash :-) Until then, both of these dollar figures are pure fantasy.

Related question, is there a way to see inflow/outflow of dollars or any other real-world currency from/to these exchanges?

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Are these African or European swallows?

The difference is Coinbase clearly announced their position that they will NOT honour Bitcoin Cash ahead of time

https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...

Basically, they said "if your pregnant cow gives birth, we will not give you the calf. If you want your calf, take your cow away from Coinbase and keep it on your own pasture!" And their customers heard it, said ok I'll keep the cow with you, and when the cow gave birth they cried foul.

Sheesh, this situation is 100% predicable because Coinbase announced it ahead of time.

The problem is they have a 48 hour timer on cold wallets. Which leaves you 2 days to move those coins and if you have a withdrawal limit of $10k but you had 20 BTC in cold storage you were only able to get ~4 btc out of coinbase in time.

This fork was foretold weeks or months ago. Sure, the precise timing of the fork wasn't known until July, but everyone has been talking about "bitcoin's gonna fork" for ages - even hit hacker news multiple times.

Bitcoin holders need to take responsibility for their own holdings, especially when there is no FDIC or any type of assurance that your coins are going to be your coins.

Yeah except that email to that affect only went out July 27 @ 11pm EST.

So for Coinbase customers not tracking the fork news, this was a total blindside. This gives you 3 days to get all your coins out?

Not to mention if you used the "Coinbase Vault" your coins are subject to a 48 hour holding period before you can them into a usable Wallet. Then you have to wait for what was at some points an 8 hour transaction delay?

Also you need to figure out how securely set up a wallet, potentially order wallet hardware, etc.

No court would say that was sufficient notice.

Your cow would die birthing during transport. You could then sue the guy transporting your cow, but the judge would dismiss your case because shipping a cow short before birthing is just a stupid idea.

>place that does not give access to their own private keys.

IIRC there is an option to have a wallet with Coinbase where you do control the private keys, that said I don't know how they were affected by the split.

But (to repeat another comment), some exchanges do have fiduciary status -- Gemini, for one, and I assume others. Would they be obligated to preserve the value of BCH for clients?

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.

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.

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.

If CB can't easily allow customers to withdraw the BCC, they probably can't easily exchange the BCC themselves either? (I recognize that people not being able to withdraw the coins at all is an issue, just curious also about the ability of CB to speculate in the interim).

Allowing customers to withdraw BCC involves adapting their platform to connect to the BCC network, track how many BCCs each user owns, allow them to issue transaction orders in it, etc.

To exchange themselves they only need to load their existing wallets in an existing BCC client.

>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.

But is that really what's going on? As I understand it, each BTC also became a BCC at the time of the fork, and owners can now decide on which network they want to use these units (CB users are not technically owners though). No free BCCs were distributed.

If I were to decide to move 1 BTC to a BCC wallet now, I would buy something worth $650 for something worth $2700.

That is my very tentative understanding at least.

> As I understand it, each BTC also became a BCC at the time of the fork, and owners can now decide on which network they want to use these units (CB users are not technically owners though). No free BCCs were distributed.

No. Each BTC also became a BCC at the time of the fork, and now exists independently on both networks. Owners are free to use them on each network. That is the concept of a fork -- it's an intended double spending attack. There is no such concept as "moving 1 BTC to a BCC wallet". Moving BTC means a transaction on the BTC blockchain. Moving BCC means a transaction on the BCC blockchain.

This is confusing stuff, but there's no "deciding" if your coin is a BTC or BCC, the chain split and both exist now if you had a BTC pre-split.

The chains do not talk to each other in any way, so you can spend your BTCs and BCCs independently. So yes, free BCCs were given to everybody with BTCs.

Imagine it as if someone copied the entire history of bitcoin and just renamed it and started running on different nodes. That's basically what happened. If the bitcoin history showed you owned 10 BTC, then the renamed history shows you own 10 BCC.

Yep, they screwed up big time.

Since BCC doesn't have enough hash power to mine blocks trading/withdrawal would not work anyway.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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

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?

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

> 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?

no - they're just not doing anything with it.

Where have they explicitly contractually commited to this?

> no - they're just not doing anything with it.

"We're not taking it, we're just not giving it to you."

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.

They can't delete the keys without also losing the BTCs. They could transfer the BCC to non-existent addresses, though.

They still have the control over their clients' BCH, just not moving it. They didn't burn anything.

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.

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

The latter part of this comment seems to confuse BCC/BCH with BTC.

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

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.

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...

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%.

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?

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".

Being able to easily handle a potentially large amount of money is exactly the reason why Bitcoin was created in the first place, so you don't need to depend on entities like banks.

But even then, if you don't want to do that, there are other exchanges and online wallets that can do all that for you.

Uh, you literary did not respond to any of my remarks on why someone might find it scary.

But I did: if you read my comment you will see I literally wrote that you don't have to store the wallet yourself, just use some online wallet. Another option is a hardware wallet like Trezor.

What I don't understand is why would anyone who is so scared of using Bitcoin transfer money to Coinbase to buy Bitcoins. To me this is the same as withdrawing all your money from your bank while being super scared of having your own savings in cash at home.

No, that doesn't address the potential fear a customer might have.

And I didn't even mention the problems with an online wallet. Yes, you should fear online wallets.

To buying bitcoins on Coinbase (and almost any other exchange) one have to use their online wallet. Fear was not a decisive issue when you (fig.) decided to buy bitcoins, but for whatever reason it is now that you want to move them somewhere else?

For me, keeping coins on an exchange is scary with the many, many failures and hacks. I prefer to keep mine on a Trezor.

> Third, "Bitcoin Cash" is an altcoin, and anyone can create a similar fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, should Coinbase support them all??

Good luck creating a fork with currently 20% of the value of Bitcoin.

Non sequitur, but anyways: I could hard-fork the blockchain any day and sell each mined altcoin to myself to then sue Coinbase for not supporting my fork. How that makes any sense?

Sure if you can get a serious volume and trade on other exchanges where people are trading and keep it up for a bit, then yes, Coinbase should support your fork.

We'll see in a few more days when real trading is happening where BCC ends up.

Did you not read my comment? What is confusing?

There is nothing confusing, your reasoning is simply unsound: the market price (not the value) of some traded altcoin is completely irrelevant to Bitcoin. Even the price of Bitcoin itself is irrelevant to the Bitcoin protocol. There is no law, anywhere in the world, mandating cryptocurrency exchanges to adopt altcoins after they reach some price point, and exchanges are not obligated to trade new altcoins either (which requires adapting their infrastructure, so it makes sense if they decide to not doing it), so, why exactly should it matter that Bitcoin Cash is being traded somewhere else for X% of the current price of Bitcoin? It simply doesn't.

> why exactly should it matter that Bitcoin Cash is being traded somewhere else for X% of the current price of Bitcoin? It simply doesn't.

Because Coinbase is keeping the coins the customers could have used to gain the X%?

1) In the same way how a bank use your cash deposits to do whatever they want with those bills, Coinbase can do the exact same thing because they never promised to their clients that they, the clients, were the owners of some private keys. This is basically the end of the story here.

2) Coinbase never said that they would adopt Bitcoin Cash. If these customers were really interested in doing some sort of investment they could have withdrawn their funds somewhere else months ago. Scared of using Bitcoin? then don't! sell your btcs for fiat and transfer it to your bank account, then transfer that to some other exchange that decided to adopt Bitcoin Cash.

1) Banks can not do whatever they want...

2) Months ago? Oh, you mean a couple of days before the fork when Coinbase announced they wouldn't support Bitcoin Cash?

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?

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.

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

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

I found myself having my BTC assets copied to BCH on kraken.com, which I think is the best thing ever.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

After the fork, BTC and BCH are distinct and independent. So buying BTC after the fork would gives the buyer zero BCH.

So who owns the correspondent BCH (assuming that the seller was a coinbase user before the fork)? Coinbase? The previous owner?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Allowing BCC withdrawal doesn't mean it has to happen day one. But they could have said "within x days we will offer BCC withdrawl". That is better than they did.

Explain how you'd lose both coins? (If you mean 'well they could rush a code change and lose all their money', yes that's a risk. They shouldn't rush it.) The BCC chain has 2 way replay protection (granted, late addition) - but if it didn't, then Coinbase should have actively moved coins on BCC to prevent replays.

And if they "might", then it's unclear. That's just saying they're going to wait and see if BCC is popular enough. Instead they should have defined criteria of what popular enough is, and that'd have put to rest people's concerns.

All I'm objecting to is that "they handled it the best", which is clearly not the case.

Hahaha. You try this as any supplier of any service advertising custody of anything: "We will grab what would otherwise be yours, but as a result of our custody can be made to be ours. Because $WORDS"

There's nobody grabbing anything, if you find evidence that Coinbase is transacting BCC with customers' funds when they said they simply were not supporting the fork, please share with the group!

You are right and I am sorry. "Withholding" sounded somehow less poetic, I guess.

There's no difference between trading the BCC or just throwing them into the trash.

Yes there is? One way is an active investment in the "new thing" and blatantly dishonest (would rightly get you sued,) and the other is exactly like voting "no-confidence."

Here, I'll take your side: there is no difference between your spending time to support a thing, and your not expending any labor on the thing. How do you like that?

You might get them at a later date. Happened with Ethereum classic.

4 days on Coinbase is not enough time. The transactions there are unbelievably slow. It took me 2 days to transfer my bitcoin away, and this was a month ago. I can only imagine how slow it was during this fork process.

I bought some bitcoins on July 28th or so, and it took two hours for the transaction to appear on the blockchain.

4 days is not plenty of notice before you loose out on a possibly significant amount of funds.

It's still no excuse for Coinbase to hold onto something that is not theirs.

Coinbase put withdrawal limits on how much BTC could be transferred in a day. I emailed support so many times but no response, and in the end, I couldn't get it all out.

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.

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

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.

Thanks for the response!

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?

Most exchanges, wallets, miners, etc currently support BTC and designate it as the new Bitcoin. The switching costs are the big hassle.

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

Bitcoin does not equal coinbase. Two completely different things.

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