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Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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?

>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?

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