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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Why is anyone surprised by this? Coinbase sent an email out months ago saying they'd do this by Jan 1, 2018.

    Dear Coinbase customer, 
    
    ...
    We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by 
    January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge 
    during that time.
    ...
    
    Thank you,
    
    Coinbase Team

Am I crazy?

Edit: let me answer those who think I am crazy. BTC literally tripled overnight a few weeks ago when there was "speculation" about futures contracts. Price swings in the crypto world happen over the least sensible things. My assumption was that the news from Coinbase was actually helping prop up BCH all this time, and that may have been true. I guess I took for granted that it was a sure thing.

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The next line was "Once supported, customers will be able to withdraw bitcoin cash. We'll make a determination at a later date about adding trading support."

> assuming no additional risks emerge

The letter was simply a possible notion. No guarantee. Why not send out another letter saying they were going to release it on this day?

I know why, because they wanted to manipulate the market.

I thought it was pretty obvious if they committed to giving people their BCH balance they'd have to at least halfway support it. Plus, they never reported any setbacks. The people I talk crypto with and myself are already busy trying to guess what will make it on Coinbase/GDAX after BCH. If this development is any indicator, we're wasting our time since we can just wait until they announce and buy in the period between announcement and launch (assuming they announce the next one before launching it).

I’m not sure that they’ll announce the next one. I think BCH was a bit of an anomaly i this regard. At the time of the fork, Coinbase announced that they wouldn’t support BCH, and then in response to the outcry, changed course and said that they would.

I’m not so sure they’ll do the same with upcoming additions. I do definitely see the merit of trying to guess their next move though, as there seems to be a lot of money in Coinbase just chasing whatever comes up in hopes that it will also go to 20,000/coin

There is an interview with the new CEO saying that they have a formal review process for adding new 'currencies' and BCH is simply first in line. Having many cryptos adds legitimacy, whether there is one underneath or not.. THey can say oh BTC, BCH, LTC all crashed, but ETH only crashed by 150% so cryptocurrencies are still viable (even when they are not)

Plenty of other exchanges have BCH at $3500 (or so), while Coinbase has it at over $8k: an arbitrage like nothing I've ever seen. Conveniently, buy/sell of BCH on Coinbase is temporarily disabled (or at least it was a few minutes ago).

It was a flash spike, it's back down

I don't understand. By that logic, would not announcement with the date manipulate the market? Future known events are priced in in the market..

If the announcement came today instead same thing might have happened with prices.

If this was so obvious to you in the hindsight, you could have made a ton of money by backing this with investments.

Only if he knew that it wasn't obvious to anyone else ;). I guess people that have been playing with crypto currencies for a long time (like me) have been having a lot of "wtf, why now" moments lately.

I find myself explaining blockchains at birthdays all of a sudden. No one cared whe I first started voicing my enthusiasm over this tech in 2011 or so and then again in 2014. I didn't get rich from it, I really don't understand why people want BTC just at the point the transaction costs are insane and the political situation is unclear with all the forks and such. In 2014 I settled beer bills over BTC and transactions costs were negligible. It was pure fun. Strange world.

> I really don't understand why people want BTC just at the point the transaction costs are insane ...

The value of bitcoin increased tenfold in 1 year. They just want to get rich.

>> have been having a lot of "wtf, why now" moments

Because the market is dominated by irrational actors. Other markets are dominated by large corporate entities who, as a rule, move according to established principals backed by a body of government regulations. The BC market is dominated by naive small investors and shady large players. The small players are dumping money in on the expectation of getting rich. The big players are leveraging the lack of regulation to pull tricks that they could not in other markets, tricks that look strange and irrational to anyone who doesn't know the game. So prices move wildly based on a combination of fashion and intrigue.

they are selling the image of a responsible company. they should have set a specific date, it was a no-brainer. people should not trust them anymore as the amazon of exchanges.

I can only assume that there is some population of speculators that are only able to purchase bitcoin cash through Coinbase.. maybe the other exchanges make it too difficult?

No, can't really be the case that they can't rather they would just have to be too ignorant to do it elsewhere, if you can buy Bitcoin it's relatively trivial to buy any other crypto currency.

A number of friends of mine in the US only want to deal with Coinbase. It is probably a combination of having already set up there and not wanting to submit ID to other exchanges, and having trust issues with other ones.

Also, bitstamp verification time is now 2 weeks, and bittrex has completely paused any new signups.

In the US, if you link a bank account to Coinbase then you don't even have to submit an ID. So the barrier to entry is significantly lowered compared to other exchanges.

From the time this was posted to your comment, Bitcoin Cash went up 300%.

That's why I'm confused. I would have thought people would have been stocking up starting back in August (and especially as December passed and it wasn't on Coinbase/GDAX yet).

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