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