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Comment by duren | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about Coinbase, but I really appreciate their willingness to adapt and respond to customer feedback.

I personally didn't want to take on the risk of creating a paper wallet and having to move my small amount of BTC from my Coinbase vault, so this is great news for me.

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They should have seen this coming (from the ETC split) and come up with this policy ahead of time, instead of scaring customers into withdrawing or providing any doubt that using Coinbase might mean losing out on significant value.

All they had to say was "BCC support for withdrawals will happen within 30 days if BCC trades above X% of BTC". Or basically anything to the effect of "if BCC is worth anything, we'll give it to you", thus satisfying most people without committing to handling worthless forks.

They didn't adapt. BCH created a new op code for replay protection, so it's trivial to create a transaction to at least cash out BCH. It just doesn't take 5 to change a bit in a transaction before signing. Also they can just copy open source code that does this already well.

That bit is just a flag which indicates that how the actual signatures on the transaction are done has changed. In order to create a valid transaction you have to implement those changes too, and not all the open source code that claims to do this actually gets it right. And of course, being able to build transactions is just part of what you have to do to support a new coin.

Taking 5 months to enable trading doesn't seem like "adoption"

You should visit the headquarters of some slow-moving enterprises.

Slow moving enterprises in technology world are an age old phenomena. Even - long established, waterfall pattern following - enterprises are acknowledging this and speeding up their cycles. In the current world of fast pace technology, one cannot justify by giving such examples.

It's more complicated than this.

They probably could implement it much sooner, but they are waiting for 2 things (I'm speculating here).

1. Larger hashrate, which decreases likelihood of a 51% attack.

2. SegWit2x November hard fork.

Why would you need a paper wallet for a small amount?

How else would I safely keep the private keys?

Use wallet software on your own PC. I run a full node on my PC.

Thanks, I'll look into it. My naïve opinion is that a desktop client would be less secure than Coinbase's vault. Hardware wallets are generally unavailable or inflated (Trezor and Nano S). Therefore, I assumed paper wallet was the only option.

Uh okay. I will say what I will. They could have held this position from the beginning if they had any foresight at all. How hard would it have been to say something like: 'We do not plan to support Bitcoincash given the impact on operations, security, and value uncertainty. If you want complete freedom with your Bitcoincash, take out your Bitcoin. Otherwise, we may add support in the future, but the timeline will be based on our determination of risk to our systems and effort required.'

DO you mean like they said on July 28th?

> Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required.

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

They also emailed it to current customers. samnwa, didn't you receive your copy?

> How hard would it have been to say something like

I would suggest that neither of us have any idea how hard that would be. (Also, they gave a pretty similar announcement, minus the "we might support BCH in the future" bit.)

From my perspective, they are now going to devote a shit ton of engineering effort into supporting BCH withdrawals, which will not provide a source of recurring revenue.

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