Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash.<p>So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled trading it (which they didn't with ETC when ETH forked), all those Coinbasers wouldn't be able to sell anyways. They'd be waiting like everyone else, so that $700 price wouldn't matter.
Coinbase is in a bad situation here. If they set a precedent that all BTC forks will be available to their users, then they open themselves to some pretty obvious DOS attacks.<p>10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd.<p>I think it's pretty obvious that they're going to just issue the BCH to people eventually.<p>Here's another thought experiment: I am a now-extremely-wealthy bitcoin early adopter, and I am so happy at bitcoin's success that I am going to distribute $100 of USD cash per bitcoin to every person who can show me that they own a bitcoin.<p>To claim your $100, send me a Self-addressed-stamped-envelope proving your bitcoin ownership, and I will mail you back the cash.<p>Does coinbase have an obligation to send a bunch of SASEs to me? Are the coinbase customer's "owed" that $100?<p>I personally don't think so. I think that's the tradeoff you're making by having coinbase securely store your coins for you.
Note that Bitstamp, another large exchange, took a similar stance as Coinbase and has issued an update stating customers will receive their BHC balance:<p><a href="https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitstamp.net/article/bitcoin-cash-our-position/</a><p>For those of our customers who chose to leave their BTC on our platform at the time of the fork, we recorded their BCH balances for the timestamp of the last common block (block 478558), which is 1 August 2017, 13:16:14 UTC.<p>These BCH balances will be made available to our customers as soon as it is safe to do so. If and when the Bitcoin Cash system has been thoroughly tested and is sufficiently stable, we will then consider listing BCH. However, a series of technical, safety and regulatory requirements need to be met in order for this to occur, and it is still too early in the day to make realistic predictions about the timeframes involved.
It's an interesting situation, but assigning liability to coinbase for this seems like it'd be a problem long term. Unlike traditional securities, there's nothing stopping me from going out and making my own fork tomorrow - and then would all exchanges be required to add support for that fork, too? Where do you draw the line?
Just to clarify: bitcoin cash (BCH) is only <i>sortof</i> worth $700. There aren't any mainstream exchanges accepting BCH deposits right now, so the market for BCH is limited mostly to people on kraken trading BCH with one another <i>there</i> only.<p>The exchanges that are accepting BCH require 20 confirmations on your BCH deposit before they let you withdraw the BTC/XBT you traded them for. 20 confirmations right now would take multiple days. The exchanges offering this also seem to have pretty lax identity requirements, which is not a great sign.
What I think all the press isn't making very clear is that to the best of my understanding for every Bitcoin you own, you get a Bitcoin Cash coin. There is no "conversion", it is free money for all BTC holders. Everyone who owned BTC, now owns BTC+BCC.<p>Of course if your BTC is not real, but is held by an exchange such as Coinbase, how you get your BCC isn't at all clear.
Meanwhile, it's 12 hours since Bitcoin Cash actually mined a block.<p>The only reason the price is so high is because people can't make transactions to send their BCH to exchanges.<p>EDIT: My mistake. Originally said 20 hours. It's only 12.
The problem both sides are trying to solve is that the system as a whole cannot handle the volume of transactions. Before the split, bitcoin handled 7 transactions per second, while Visa handles 50,000 transactions per second (I'm worrying these numbers from memory, so they might be wildly inaccurate).<p>Bitcoin Cash solves this with a larger block size. This is admittedly a short-term solution.<p>Bitcoin main, on the other hand, is moving toward SegWit, which introduces third-party middlemen. Service providers like Coinbase want this, because they get to be the middlemen.<p>But critically, SegWit breaks the only long-term advantage Bitcoin currently has over Visa. SegWit isn't decentralized. Bitcoin with SegWit still isn't as fast as Visa, so if you don't need decentralization then you should just use Visa. The only people who benefit from bitcoin with SegWit are the middlemen.<p>Decentralization is bitcoin's core value proposition. If you give that up to solve the scaling problem, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.<p>I don't know the long term solution to bitcoin's scaling problem, but I do know that I'm not interested in a centralized cryptocurrency.
I wonder sometimes if the origin of coinage was similarly fraught with these sorts of challenges. The history of money exhibit at the British Museum is pretty awesome and they go over some of the 'coin scams' of the day like nicking bits off the coins and remelting them into new coins, melting coins and alloying them with other metals so that they 'felt right' but were diluted. People who no longer had to be 'landed' could steal enough coins and be 'rich'. Etc.<p>So back in that time when a new coin came out, I'm sure the money changers would spend good long time watching it to see how it was abused before they started accepting it as a 'real' coin.<p>Seems like much the same is true for blockchain currencies, they all need a bit of 'bake time' before you really understand both the demand and the risks associated with them.
Coinbase did the right thing by warning their users beforehand that they wouldn't work with BCH.<p>They could have simply ignored it altogether and continue business as usual like nothing had ever happened.<p>Now after the fork, if people want to convert BTC to BCH, they have to go through a intermediary currency, just like many banks won't convert USD to $unknown_currency sometimes.<p>It doesn't surprise me there are talks about lawsuits, cryptocurrencies will have a hard time shaking off all the speculators and scammers.
For all the people saying this is totally fine and they warned people and they shouldn't have to support every single fork that comes along, I'd like to pose a hypothetical.<p>All forks are basically equivalent. If I fork Bitcoin today, my fork is just as legitimate as Segwit or Bitcoin Cash. The only differentiation is community buy-in and hashing power and similar fuzzy metrics.<p>Rather than sticking with Segwit and ignoring BCC, what if Coinbase had ignored Segwit and stuck with BCC? People would have lost 75% of their holdings, as measured in USD. Would you consider that to be OK?<p>Or worse, imagine if Coinbase created their own fork and starting from some certain date they only supported that fork, and it ended up being worthless because nobody cared about it. Coinbase would have basically wiped out all of their users. Would that be OK?
Coinbase will either cave in on this or be sued and lose. Especially since they're sluggish about large withdrawals.<p>The real risk for Coinbase comes if they don't have 100% of the Bitcoins on deposit. If they don't have all those Bitcoins, like Mt. Gox, we're going to find out.
Sorry but what exactly is Bitcoin Cash? It seems like it's a fork in the BTC blockchain, but what prompted it and what gives it any sort of value, let alone a $12*10^9? Is it somehow technically superior? Is the move going to be to have BTC and BTC Cash exist side by side? Or are they going to fight for the market?
As an outsider, the remarkable thing about this to me is that one can (for now) sell the same bitcoins twice, right? If I own 1 bitcoin pre-fork, I can sell it for $2700 and then sell the exact same bitcoin again as Bitcoin Cash for $700. Crazy.
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).<p>Coinbase can do anything they want!<p>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.<p>Anyone who cries that Coinbase didn't do whatever is being childish and deserves it.
I don't really follow these cryptocurrencies very closely.<p>I assume that Coinbase is sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin belonging to their customers, which would mean that they are now also sitting on keys/wallets that own Bitcoin Cash. So could Coinbase short (some of) that Bitcoin Cash by selling it on other exchanges?<p>I read this statement from Coinbase: "If this decision were to change in the future and Coinbase was to access Bitcoin Cash, we would distribute Bitcoin Cash to customers associated with Bitcoin balances at the time of the fork." So as long as Coinbase bought back enough Bitcoin Cash to distribute it to customers at time-of-fork-value, they would be true to their word.<p>Or is there something that prevents Coinbase from even accessing the Bitcoin Cash associated with Bitcoin it is holding?<p><i>Edit: I'm not trying to make any judgments here, I don't know enough. Just trying to understand.</i>
This seems fishy to me. There’s a huge divergence in the price between the various exchanges that claim to trade BCH[1], signaling that arbitrageurs are unable to deposit to/withdraw from the exchanges.<p>Many exchanges aren’t even allowing BCH deposits, meaning that the price isn’t connected to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, since you can’t sell these coins into the market. Right now there seems to exist multiple different BCH — one for each exchange — all of them with a different price because they’re not joined by the coins on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.<p>[1] <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets</a>
So you needed to get 'your' BTC into a real wallet (and not an exchange) to be able to have pre-fork BTC that would act as BCH.<p>While similar to both currency and commodity, this is one of the situations where cryptocurrency acts as more of a fungible contract than either the currency or commodity. IANAL, but it seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of law written on that. I'd argue that Coinbase expended its fiduciary duty by warning their users of the fork.<p>Coinbase/kraken/et al., however, don't create/issue the cryptocoins, so it's probably a misnomer to call them exchanges. At best, they are brokerages.<p>Now say that a bunch of users decided to instruct their broker that's holding their security in trust to so assign the security to the user, and the brokerage sat on that transaction rather than perform the request in a timely fashion? I'd say that potentially counts as a whole host of other actionable events, depending on the intent of the brokerage operators. Not sure if I'd call that front running, but that sounds like a good start to investigate.
Soars to $700 because nobody who owns any is able to sell them. Trading is not open to the public except on one exchange right now, and while that exchange is holding a comfortable $350, it's also an unpopular and low-volume exchange - I'm guessing 90% of their users today made accounts today just to sell their Bitcoin Cash. I know I did.<p>Once Kraken, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and the other major BCH supporting exchanges are actually accepting deposits, I imagine we'll see the price take a nosedive.
To be fair, as long as you do not have the private key to your wallet, you do not have complete control.<p>Whoever kept their bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet and wanted to use Bitcoin Cash, it was their responsibility to move them to a wallet they fully control in advance to the fork.
75% of the hashrate was just advertrolling. Which had the side effect of keeping the difficulty high. They should have forked Bitcoin and used a different PoW... Oh wait that's Litecoin.<p><a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they-mined-most-of-the-bitcoin-cash-blocks/" rel="nofollow">https://news.bitcoin.com/the-trading-center-in-hk-where-they...</a>
Coinbase will likely allow users to withdraw their BCH, but not exchange it, so they'll have to go elsewhere. They did the exact same thing with Ethereum Classic (after the price dropped like 80% from the initial spike, no less), and they ended support for those withdrawals at the end of 2016. To handle this fork differently could invite another lawsuit.
Some already mentioned this list showing some exchanges that currently offer the ability to trade BCH assets for BTC or fiat currency. [1]<p>Note however that due to low count of blocks currently being mined for BCH there is no chance for the exchanges to get enough confirmations for deposited BCH from any (private, non-exchange) wallet to safely confirm the deposit.<p>So the only BCH assets that are currently being sold are probably the ones that were granted by the exchanges to the people that did not bother to transfer their BTC credit into their self-controlled wallet previous to the fork.<p>I think this is also a reason why BTC assets seem to be a bit overvalued right now.<p>[1] <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets</a>
This experiment in crypto currency has made me see the value in fiat money, which is probably the opposite of the desired effect.<p>At the end of they day, these digital monetary schemes have become less of a currency and more of a commodity.<p>Can someone explain to me why I should be less jaded about crypto currencies?
> Coinbase has clearly stated the company is not taking customers' Bitcoin Cash for themselves<p>So effectively, it's as if they just burned all of the Bitcoin Cash they were holding?
Its at $750 now <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd" rel="nofollow">https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd</a>
Crazy that it was trading at $1200 BTC all-time high 3 years ago
I thought that with Coinbase you really didn't "own" the coins. As in, if you bought a bitcoin via Coinbase you really didn't hold a bitcoin, you really just held a promise that Coinbase would give you a bitcoin at a later date. If that were the case, would they actually be liable for giving you anything related to bitcoin forks?<p>It's also not like they didn't give warning ahead of time either. If you really wanted to use BCC/BCH (whatever gets decided on) you could've just moved the funds out of Coinbase into an offline wallet and sent them back post fork.
From the class-action lawsuit website "FAQ":<p>> <i>Coinbase allowed users to withdraw BTC prior to the hard fork</i><p>> <i>The process of transferring Bitcoin can be complex and potentially very risky even for experienced users. Additionally, creation of a new account or wallet on a different exchange is often a lengthy and difficult process. While Coinbase did suggest to users that they could move their BTC to a different wallet in order to obtain BCH, the procedure can be seen as prohibitive by a significant portion of users. Finally, many users reported slow or non-responsive site when trying to move their BTC from Coinbase prior to the lock-down that preceded the hard fork.</i><p>First, transferring founds from one wallet to another is trivial in Bitcoin, and in fact it is easier than any other money transfer method that I know of. Second, if it really was that difficult then why they are, at the same time, accepting donations using Bitcoin and Ethereum on the same website?. Third, "Bitcoin Cash" is an altcoin, and anyone can create a similar fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, should Coinbase support them all?? because that would be ridiculous.<p>I can not believe these people are serious...
If the only difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is that bitcoin cash has larger block sizes (true?), why does bitcoin cash not go "back" to the bitcoin blockchain since it is now much longer and should also be a valid bitcoin cash blockchain?
Not sure why there's so much hype. Of course the price is going to be up, there's not enough BCH to be traded so naturally the demand will cause the price to go up temporarily.