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Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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