Update on Bitcoin Cash
blog.coinbase.comI have been a long time coinbase user. I have been very unhappy with their support. I have been unable to add additional funds to buy both additional ethereum and btc from their site, even after contacting them repeatedly about this ... but never getting a reply. I did multiple identity verifications and connected bank and credit cards. No luck in being able to transact properly. Bitcoin Cash was a forcing function and last week I sent my funds to a private wallet. I am also buying additional crypto on Gemini and other exchanges. To give an idea of my frustration with them, I first tried to buy ethereum thru then at $40. I gave them benefit of the doubt in solving my issues ... and waited and waited. By the time I realized that they were not listening to me, ether had shot up to more than $200. I ultimately bought on Gemini. This was their business to lose and they did exactly that.
I've had almost exactly the same experience. I recently withdrew all my btc into an offline wallet because I just couldn't trust having to deal with Coinbase support based on prior experience.
One example springs to mind. I bought some ETH once they initially began supporting it, just before it shot up in value. However, the transaction just seemed to disappear and I lost out. I tried contacting support by they just kept closing my tickets without explanation. Very, very frustrating.
The only weapon you have (that they care about) is a chargeback dispute.
I know a story when someone bought some coins with Visa credit card and they had some issues with Conibase service. Same story with tickets - open only to have it closed down next day with suggestion to look into knowledge base.
Then they proceed to the bank and opened a chargeback dispute based on false advertising (legitimate reason) that Coinbase promised to help and are not.
You see - since crypto-currency is not tangible item (you can call it service, if you will), neither Visa, nor Amex or Mastercard will have issues with your dispute, because there is even no tracking to proof you received your "product". Of course once the funds are returned to your credit card and bank notifies Coinbase about the dispute, Coinbase will take your coins away from you, but that's not the point. You see -- it doesnt matter to Visa if you process $1 billion in monthly transactions - if you have too many chargebacks, they will shut you down. End of the story. You open another account - you go on the MATCH list and owner(s) SSN/IDs are on it for 5 years so bye bye processing credit card transactions.
Coinbase might not care about you (I am sure they do per se, they just cheap and won't hire enough eyeballs to answer customer support), but surely they care about their chargebacks dispute level.
I've gotta say I've always been skeptical of posts like this because there is a lot of faux hate spewed on the Internet about Coinbase due to them having spoken the heresy of supporting bigger blocks.
That said I'm currently experiencing a problem where all emails from Coinbase to my email address are being lost and it isn't a spam filter. I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
If all they are going to do is regurgitate information from there website why do they have support people at all?
If anyone from Coinbase is reading this all email sent from Coinbase to the Purdue Alumni email forwarding service @alumni.purdue.edu is being lost or not sent or something. It may have something to do with the fact that the alumni.purdue.edu server doesn't support TLS. I don't know just a guess but I know something changed in the past couple months and I don't even get marketing emails from Coinbase any more and it is preventing me from logging into my account.
> I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
I had a similar issue. I posted a clear support ticket, heard nothing for at least a day or two (probably longer) then got boilerplate about checking the support website. I replied saying I did and that the information on the support page couldn't be used to solve the problem. Nothing from Coinbase for a week, then another bot email saying they'll close the ticket unless I reply (again!) saying my issue was not resolved. This back and forth lasted over a month.
It reflects pretty poorly on them as a company and I really can't recommend using them as a result. The underlying support issue was related to their verification software. If their verification software doesn't work for some reason and their support is isn't focused/careful, then you're out of your account for more than a month.
Working in higher ed, I'd say it's more likely your university is filtering it as spam before it ever hits your inbox. Bitcoin and it's ilk are giant red flags for over-protective systems. (I'm not endorsing it, just trying to give some advice).
It's just a forwarding account, I've had it for over a decade and have never experienced it filtering spam or coinbase emails before this past month. I think it is a lot more likely that Coinbase did something with their email system. The forwarding service doesn't support TLS so it seems plausible that Coinbase wouldn't want to send email to known insecure smtp servers but who knows.
I, too, have had terrible past experiences with Coinbase and I no longer use them. I now buy on Gemini for fiat -> BTC and use other exchanges for altcoins. That said, I no longer keep any crypto on any exchange, including Gemini. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you are your own bank via ownership of your private keys. By giving them to Coinbase, you centralize the system, concentrate the risk, and create honeypots for hackers. Remember, the government doesn't insure Bitcoin balances like it does with USD in banks and so much Bitcoin has been lost via exchange hacks in the past few years.
Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.
If you're an above-average HN reader who knows something about security, then absolutely you should hold your own coins.
But for the average person the chances are much higher that they will get hacked or lose their keys than losing their coins on Coinbase.
> The whole point of Bitcoin is that you are your own bank
There are several important differences between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. This may be the most important one to you, but it is not to everyone.
Given the high profile attacks on crypto exchanges over recent years, how much trust do you place in Gemini securing your SSN, proof of ID, and proof of address?
Not very much, but only because those are byproducts of a cryptocurrency hack. If they didn't control centralized private keys and thus implicitly have one of the biggest bug bounties, I would be less worried about people hacking my SSN, ID, etc. from Gemini.
That said, I also don't care as much if those get hacked as I can recover from stolen identity, while it's impossible to get back stolen bitcoin.
They are so convenient though :)
Terrible support, if you cant even get answers to basic questions then why would you want to potentially invest through their platform? I immediately sacked them off after not even being able to get a satisfactory response to ID checks
Not to mention that their website was pretty much constantly down during the recent period of Ethereum volatility. Whenever Ethereum price started to move (which is exactly the moment when people want to sell/buy) they would go tits up. And not just for a minute or two, but hours.
I've had a problem where 2FA would always default to the authy app I once used, but I just wanted the raw QR code to use a simple OTP app.
One week after contacting their support and not getting any response, I got an automated response asking if I am still interested in a follow up and if so, I should reply to this mail.
This continued for 2 months every week. I then decided to start complaining on their subreddit and twitter and coincidentally immediately got a mail helping me with my original problem and finally fixing it.
Now with the hardfork I withdrew all my funds as well and will never go back.
Interesting. I had mined some coins a few years ago, and finally decided to sell them off. I was able to sell them on coinbase within 5 days and get the USD into my bank account the following day.
I have had overwhelmingly crappy support as well: initially verified, but then revoked and impossible to reinstate. identity verification uploads that are never satisfactory, or are "processing" indefinitely. laggy orders that cause price shifts in counterparties favor. messages to help desk that go unanswered.
Also during this spring when BTC was up and down on a day to day basis, their services/app was down a few times. Just when you need the app the most, it fails you.
So I don't trust them and as soon as a viable alternative comes along I'm off Coinbase.
Same here. I got so fed up with their terrible support I left.
Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.
Before you declare an exception to Hanlon's Razor, hear my story.
Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on.
Years later I still have that BTC.
I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees."
You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.
Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff...
In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.
Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.
The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
Slightly off topic but I think transaction fees should be as close to zero. No, I am not talking about lightning. If we need to start fresh and design a new system that allows it, I am all for ditching Bitcoin altogether as well. It will have served a purpose in that we have learned a lot.
To me, low transaction fees is more important than even anonymity or decentralization. My understanding of the problem is that we need to somehow encourage everyone to run a full node. We've decided a transaction fee that goes to "miners" is a good way to do that.
Well, my problem is that now miners want higher transaction fees. We have inherently opposite goals and as such I cannot be allied with miners at all.
Then make something else. Bitcoin is not designed to be a low/zero transaction fee system. It makes clear architectural choices in support of decentralization at the expense of scalability. Don't destroy bitcoin because you wanted something else.
Here's another story:
Long ago I tried to withdraw my BTC, but after clicking the withdrawal button the browser tab was stuck waiting for the HTTP response. So after a while I opened a second tab and tried to withdraw again. Both withdrawals went through and I ended up with a negative BTC balance on Coinbase. I sent one of the transactions back so that my balance ends up at zero again.
Oh dear... this sounds like another Mt. Gox waiting to happen. In what world will this not be exploited sooner or later?
I'm (pretty) sure this is a result of them using MongoDB. A friend of mine also accomplished a double sell (BTC -> USD, -1x credit on the BTC but +2x on the USD), he ended up keeping it and never hearing from Coinbase.
VP Ops at Coinbase
We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...
If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).
biggest thing you need to do to improve support is stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address. Replying should create a support ticket automatically if the email it came from is associated with an account. Further verification could be required depending on the request.
> stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address
This should be a general rule for the whole internet.
I think sending from a no-reply with a reply-to defined works though.
Thank you for saying this. I feel like this is a major problem with a lot of services. If they care that little to send me an email from a no-reply then how do they expect to keep customers who want to reply to the same person. There is absolutely nothing more frustrating then having 5 different people work on a similar ticket and repeat yourself over and over.
I saw your 3 month remote support contract position, I'm a lawyer in Miami working on my own tech projects, and would be interested in this type of temporary remote work with Coinbase while I hopefully get ramen profitable.
if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
If you are a lawyer, you should line up tens of unhappy Coinbase customers and start a class action.
That doesn't sound like something you do while you're concentrating on bootstrapping your own project.
That's generally not an allowed behavior by lawyers in the first place. First they must be approached by someone else who has been wronged, or the lawyer themselves must approach another firm. Otherwise, he is still free to represent himself and only himself.
There is an application and short quiz here: https://www.coinbase.com/careers/6848?locale=en-US
A lot of the issues I've encountered (which were simple card verification errors due to addresses change) could have been easily solved with better Error messages, FAQs and staff training. Instead tickets go into a black hole, you wait 6 hours and get a boilerplate response.
your team is to dumb to be in charge of other peoples money.. Bought cannabis seeds(in a legal state) with coins I bought at coinbase(sent to another wallet, then purchased..) 3 years later I get an email saying my account has been closed due to purchases I've made... LOL coinbase can go to hell.
> to dumb
Okay
yes because the measure of someones intelligence is their grammar on the internet.
I’m not sure how Bitstamp works for people in the US, but as a European I’ve had good experience with it in the past. I used both Bitfinex and Bitstamp before Bitfinex got hacked, and have been using Bitstamp exclusively for the last couple of years without any issues. I use SEPA for EUR withdrawals, which arrive in my bank account the same day.
The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched).
To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
Seconded. I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found.
No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue.
Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
VP Ops at Coinbase.
Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
Kornish's email is in his profile. Perhaps you should email him.
> I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found.
I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem.
Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
Similar experience, locked out of my account and was asked to reply to the ticket I submitted to keep it open before I even got a response. Of course I can't reply because I don't have access to the account associated with the email.
Gemini. I have been a customer of Coinbase for 4 years and Gemini for 6 months. Gemini's withdrawal to bank accounts are faster (same day). Support is more responsive. That said, both companies are licensed, 100% legit/trustworthy, and I like both honestly, but sightly prefer Gemini overall. Each company is a decent alternative to the other IMHO.
In what regard do you consider coinbase a "good alternative" to anything, let alone gemini?
The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
I stated merely my personal experience. I recognize others have different experiences... usually because of Coinbase's fraud detection false positives. Use Coinbase for a while, building a history of buying or selling, and it will help.
Still, in your personal experience, there would/could be examples of things it "does better" than gemini. I was wondering what those were.
Gemini's identification process is a bit ridiculous imo. After sending them a copy of my drivers license to prove my identity, they emailed me back asking for copy of my most recent pay stub. Ah, no. That's farther than I'm willing to go. A quick google search leads me to stories about Gemini calling employers after receiving paystubs...
Speed of Government << speed of business << speed of BitCoin forks
"viable alternative" seems pretty subjective.
CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e.
Choose your exchange carefully.
I've had a similar experience with coinbase - likely the worst customer experience of my lifetime.
In the process of switching to Gemini. Coinbase limits are too low. I've been waiting for two months for them to raise my limit to half of what Gemini will give me from the start.
The only thing that keeps me from switching to Gemini is instant buy. I only buy the amount of Bitcoin I need to send payments immediately.
yes their support is really terrible. No longer a customer
Yeah, a while ago I was trying to send some money to them but I wasn't able to validate my address because I had an apartment number but their form didn't include a space for an apartment number so I got a "non-matching address" error. I even contacted their support but they weren't helpful. I'm probably better off.
Maybe Gemini; it seems to be the "most legal".
Support on Gemini is also fantastic
bitcoin.de - have no complaints
"move fast and break things"
When you've been sitting for months with the same broken infra, you're not exactly moving fast.
Honestly, I don't understand why everyone trashes Coinbase.
I work very closely with numerous crypto exchanges for a living (I write code which interfaces with them). Outside of work, I've personally chosen to open a Coinbase account and trade on GDAX.
Coinbase is, in my opinion, the most reputable exchange out there by far.
I generally agree here, but 1. their buy/sell ACH fees are insane, 2. They're always the first to go down in those high panic button situations that have been happening every other week since may. FWIW, Kraken may require a wire, but my money always gets in the exchange for $5, and site is more reliable... the fees are 80% cheaper.
> their buy/sell ACH fees are insane
It's a form of price discrimination. Only ignorant end-consumers pay the crazy broker fees. Anyone slightly sophisticated deposits USD via ACH (nearly free) and then transfers to GDAX and does their trading there (0-0.25%).
> and trade on GDAX.
So you don't trade on Coinbase yourself?
Edit: It's almost they have one exchange for ppl who know what they're doing, & one to fleece noobs (3.9% on BTC/USD. I think).
Well, at least they have the best appearance.
As in, UX, UI, Docs, APIs, service design etc. are all top notch. Which would make it probable (but not certain) that the more technical parts are well engineered too.
Coinbase is doing perhaps something similar to what Stripe did for its field of business.
What about the crashes a little over a month ago? BTC and ETH crashed hard for a few weeks in a row and Coinbase was constantly down, stopping anyone from buying or selling.
It was a real problem.
People trash Coinbase because they deserve it: they are a disgrace. You can wait not for days, but for months without a response to support tickets. No company that is unable to communicate with its customers should be holding money on their behalf.
What do you work on that does that? I'd love to learn more. zain at za1 dot co
Coinbase is a horrific company: they give the superficial impression of being a reputable place to hold money, but one can go months at a time without a human response to support queries despite holding a substantial balance with them.
I cannot warn other potential victims of Coinbase strongly enough; hopefully the chaos and incompetence around BCC will alert people more publicly about the dangers of getting entangled with them. Hold your cryptocurrency in your own wallet that you control yourself.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Coinbase could easily avoid, or be unable to, provide BCH balances to their bitcoin holding customers.
There's no telling how Coinbase operates internally. You can't just assume that 1 customer == 1 permanent bitcoin address in Coinbase's backend. Perhaps they shift funds around all the time into new addresses, without keeping references/keys to the old ones. In that case, BCH balances would be lost, with no way to restore them to the 'owner' at the time of the fork.
Luckily (for would-be BCH holders) that seems to not be the case, but I think Coinbase deserves credit for going the extra mile when they could justifiably say that it is not their problem to deal with.
Anyone can create a new altcoin which starts with bitcoin balances at certain point of the history. If every bitcoin exchange has to support every new altcoin that does that, it would be lots of hassle. I don't think legally the exchanges would be required to provide features for the new altcoins, but it is nice from them if they do.
> without keeping references/keys to the old ones
You are correct, but this would be a new level of stupid for a leading cyrptocurrency exchange that actually tries to build a reputation and appearance of quality, safety, compliance and being a "legit" service for financial institutions etc.
Maybe I'm just not getting something in my slow brain, hopefully someone here can explain. How does taking out my BTC out of CoinBase ensure I will receive an equivalent amount of BCH?
I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitled to the same amount of BCH... what if there are more forks in the future, I'll just keep getting more of those offshoot coins as well?
You got a lot of replies, but I don't see one critical point addressed. You said you moved from Coinbase (no internal caps) to an exchange. So we can't tell whether you'll get any BCH. If you don't know the private keys for your funds, then you can't spend those funds. You can only ask whoever has your funds to spend them on your behalf. Coinbase hasn't implemented the infrastructure to spend from anything but the main chain. We don't know whether the exchange you're using has, either.
Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.
> Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control)
Actually, transferring from Coinbase to an exchange was the correct move. If you transferred BTC before the fork to an exchange that quickly implemented BCH trading you would have been credited and been able to trade right away. People (like me) who did the 'correct thing' and withdrew to their own wallets now have to wait days to deposit to a BCH exchange and will likely never see $700 BCH again.
Your statement is completely right, but the way the question was asked, OP probably didn't know whether it was an exchange "that quickly implemented BCH trading." So maybe a better analogy is being in the frying pan and pressing the hyperspace button.
By the way, why would you need to wait to sell a BCH deposit? That confirms almost immediately, right? I could understand AML/KYC on a cash withdrawal, but incoming crypto is zero risk to the exchange.
Takes 80h to confirm because of the low hash rate on the fork.
Doh. I thought the fork code had a built-in contingency for a quick difficulty adjustment in case of slow blocks. Maybe I just dreamed that.
I still don't understand how removing my funds from CB into a wallet VS into an exchange has any issue on wether or not I'll get equivalent BCH. Also, I don't understand how removing my funds from CB (into a wallet, I guess) will guarantee them giving me BCH VS having not done anything and just left the money on CB. It seems the latter would have been easier for them to debit me BCH, no?
I'm so confused.
Edit: if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
> if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
Yes, they are exactly the same. To "acquire" the BCH, do the following: first, as a safety measure, "spend" it all on the BTC chain, by sending them all to a new wallet you also control; after that, these private keys have no BTC, but still have all the BCH. Then, you have to find a BCH wallet software which is compatible with your private key format, and import the private keys into it. That's it.
Imagine you had USD 200 noted in a public ledger (BTC in address you own private keys). Somebody decides to copy that ledger and names it VSD. Its gets public support and so now you have VSD 200 at same address, accessible with same private key, and this point onwards both USD & VSD are going their seperate ways. Whatever you do to one will NOT effect the other because the ledgers are different now.
There can be as much copies of ledger (offshoot coins, forks) as anybody wishes, important is how it grows from there. Most probably it will just die within few mining blocks and thus will not carry any monetary value. And yes, anytime one forks USD to VSD/WSD/YSD/XSD/ZSD they are essentially copying the ledger from that snapshot, with your address having same balance as its fork-parent.
Even simpler analogy to work from: you have a file which has your list of things you bought and sold. The file is called 'transactions.txt' You make a copy of that file, calling it 'transactions_2.txt' and then start appending what you bought and sold on that. But then, you are also still appending to the old file what you bought and sold.
The Bitcoin/BCH thing is like this, but on a greater scale with potential risks around it (BCH had to ensure there were no replay attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain for example.) For example, Trezor recommends (and has to deliver your Bitcoin to a Bcash-specific address: https://trezor.io/claim-bch/.
Yes, and am I correct in assuming that once the transactions.txt is copied to transactions2.txt, they are same only till that point of time (or block), and can have totally independent and different entries from that point onwards?
If copy was made at block 55, 55th block is same in both branches. 56th and such blocks can be totally different. Imagine it like a literal branch of tree. Both branches share the same trunk, but are unique once seperated into unique branches.
> How does taking out my BTC out of CoinBase ensure I will receive an equivalent amount of BCH?
By taking your BTC out of Coinbase and into a wallet you control directly (on your computer or phone) before the fork, you have the corresponding private keys during the fork, which after the fork can be used to transact the same value independently on both the BTC and BCH chains.
> I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH?
What matters is what happened at the precise moment of the fork. If at that moment your BTC was on an exchange, the corresponding BCH is at that same exchange. What happens with it depends on the exchange: some might treat it as non-existent, some might credit it to you in full (but it might or might not be possible to trade and/or take it out of the exchange), some might credit it to you partially based on a confusing formula which gets changed after the fact, and some might even take all the BCH for themselves.
Because BCH used the current state of BTC as the starting point when they forked. Whatever existed in BTC now exists as BCH. And yes you will keep getting more free coins whenever there is a fork in a currency you control.
So does this mean the cost of a lawsuit was deemed greater than the cost of adding support for BCC?
That's awfully cynical. They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently? How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
> That's awfully cynical.
If you knew me in person you'd know the cynicism was intentional. I've got quite a bit to start with and double so when it comes to anything involving digital currencies.
> They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently?
On the contrary, I agreed with it. I said as much the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14915884
> How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
I don't think it's possible to tell after less than a day if it's a viable fork. It's way too early. That's why I'm thinking this is driven more from the perceived cost of lawsuits vs. the development cost of supporting the feature.
I see. I made this point somewhere else in this thread, but there's no lawsuit threat because of the terms of service (just arbitration), and if someone were a big fish but asleep at the wheel for the last few months, Coinbase could easily make them whole quickly by just manually sending them the BCH they wanted. Engineering full support as they're doing almost surely costs more than any conceivable loss customers could suffer in the interim (assuming anyone with a nontrivial balance takes responsibility for their actions or inaction).
My impression from reading their announcements before the fork is that it had always been their intention, if the new coin had any value after the fork, to later allow all users to withdraw their "cloned" balance. The transaction freeze around the fork plays into this: not only it protects them against any instability, but it also is a convenient time to snapshot everyone's balance, and to keep a copy of the private keys for future use. They probably planned the balance and keys snapshot since before the first announcement, but just didn't want to promise anything (remember that for instance the fork originally didn't have strong replay protection, which was added just a few days before the fork).
Since the fork didn't die immediately, they are going ahead with the "allow everyone to transfer their BCH out" plan. Had it died, they probably wouldn't bother.
Dumb question:
Supposing BCC eventually becomes of comparable value to BTC, does this mean everyone's fortune was just doubled?
Only if you believe BTC would've been at that same value without the fork.
Right. It's like a stock split, except the company actually splits into two essentially identical competitors.
No matter which competitor "wins", your assets should keep the same total value they had before.
Unless the competitors increase the whole market (increasing total value) or—as is plausible with a cryptocurrency with netomwork effects—the lack of a single clear choice reduces the overall value of the market compared to a don't clear choice that everyone uses.
Yep. It might not be zero-sum.
Not quite like a stock split. In stock splits its almost guaranteed that the total valuation is similar.
This is wild, wild cryptoland. At the moment both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are rising - so a lot of "free" money (at least in the short term.).
For now, two coins is better than one :p
EDIT: allright, Bitcoin Cash has been declining for a few days now. However, it still has quite a bit of value that has not disappeared from Bitcoin's value.
Rationally, though, the increase should have happened anyway. Fair point about crytoland though :)
Haven't we just had something like that happen though?
Bitcoin cash, at the time of writing, looks to be around the 300 USD mark, without BTC having moved much.
That's correct. If you had one btc before the fork, you now have one btc and one bch.
I wonder what implications this has to the global economy. If we continue to fork will there be a global hyperinflation?
So people who had 10 million in BTC just made about 2.5 million dollars?
Paper winnings. It's near impossible to trade BCC right now, so any USD value you see is questionable.
By that point BTC would most likely go down in value. The more people who use BCC, the more likely it is to overtake BTC. If less people use BTC, there won't be enough demand for it to maintain its current price.
Why would BCC be valued that high? Because of the protocol redesign? Why bother with the fork when you could start a new network and announce the Genesis block start time?
Ah yes, keeping the sha hash vulnerability open for ASIC mining attacks is not a priority? Empty block exploits not a priority? Thousands of coins have been minted to worthless "proof of work" exploits and early adopters.
Surprised it's lasted this long.
so inflation comes in terms of forks in the realm of crypto currencies.
Isn't it how it started with gold-based government currencies as well? every government created their own currency/fork of gold.
edit: typo, inflation
Do you mean inflation ? Crypto currency space is new still, forks are innovation and competition. That is good.
Can someone who understands pros and cons of bcc vs btc explain to me ( us ) which one of the two is more likely to scale / win ?
BCC = Block space isn't a big deal BTC = Block space is a big deal
The number of auditors is inversely proportional to the size of blocks.
If you don't think automated auditing of the mint by as many disparate entities as possible is a prerequisite of sound money, then you probably think BCC makes the right decisions. If you do, then BTC makes the right decisions.
There's no reason to think "as many as possible" is needed. Realistically if there's even 1000 independent entities (nodes) is that not enough? What's a realistic attack that is blocked by having another 1000 people run a node in their home?
On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."
While increasing blocks to 8 or 32MB isn't going to fix everything, it provides a lot more capacity while keeping everything on-chain and peer-to-peer. A few people being unable to run it on their home Internet is a small price to pay. And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.
There are zero similarities between SWIFT and Nakamoto payment channels, apart from the superficial common purpose of transferring value.
This suggestion stems from either dishonesty or ignorance and there is no reason to take part in that kind of mudslinging.
> There's no reason to think "as many as possible" is needed. Realistically if there's even 1000 independent entities (nodes) is that not enough? What's a realistic attack that is blocked by having another 1000 people run a node in their home?
The same kinds of attacks that have been being orchestrated against Bitcoin for the past few years - political attacks. I run a node as a means to help foster a solution to the Triffin Paradox as much as I do to transact securely and to avoid the various attacks possible against me individually should I not run a node (like replay attacks should I trade BCC). My node is my means to enforcing monetary policy that doesn't destroy my Bitcoins, allow others to create more, etc.
> On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."
This can be said of any solution that attempts to raise the block size as well. How different is a Bitcoin that only has a few hundred or thousand nodes due to resource requirements being prohibitive to others different than ACH and SWIFT either? Worse off, if I can't audit the blockchain because it's too big, then I have to depend on people. At least with lightning, I can audit the source of money.
> And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.
Why get political? Can you really argue that Core is being pigheaded? Core's development has made a lot of sense to me considering that Bitcoin has been under attack for a long time now. What would you do if:
1. One of the primary developers went outside of the until-then productive channels of protocol development? [2]
2. To attempt to orchestrate a block size increase
3. At the same time multiple attacks meant to flood the blockchain with superflous transactions are started and continue [3][4][5]
4. While social media bots were employed in r/bitcoin that categorically downvoted all content not related to increasing the block size [6]
5. And, a massive bug fix that enables other means of scaling is propagandized against to the end of using it as collateral to raise the block size [7]
6. While the same people who have been attempting to raise the block size get behind a person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, whom can't provide any credible proof and rather provides as convoluted as possible proof [8]
7. Who ultimately ends up on the team of the Bitcoin clone in question after appearing at a "Future of Bitcoin" conference coincidentally missing anybody related to Bitcoin's development of the past 8 years, yelling about things that no reasonable engineer can actually interpret as meaningful science or engineering. [9]
And at the end of the day, all these people call you pigheaded for continuing to develop software in such a way that I can maintain sovereignty over my bitcoins without having to ask anyone for permission. It's simply amazing to me that Core are successfully being painted as villains in this space. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users from access to the blockchain. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users of their ability to enforce a monetary policy realized by a token that those users provided the liquidity to make worth attacking. Core have been the only thing in the way.
And why should they get out of the way? The only argument people have is "because it will be fine and because Bitcoin needs to grow." That's not science and engineering. The internet is maintained by a few thousand entities, and can you say that it's decentralized enough? Once a year we have to black out websites so Congress doesn't destroy it. Once a week I read something about "if only we had better security at layer 2 or 3". And now we're going to make the same mistakes with the internet of money.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-e...
[3] http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/coi...
[4] https://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-spam-attack-stressed-n...
[5] http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/03/20/appears-another-spam-attac...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4biob5/research_in...
[7] https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-seg...
[8] https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-stev...
You don't need external auditors when you can audit yourself using a full validating client.
Miners provide a means of reaching consensus (it's computationally very difficult to disagree in a way that complies with the rules). That's all.
I understand this stuff but that's not enough to make confident predictions. I realize this sounds like a copout but I don't think anyone can predict what will happen here.
they are two diferent ways to solve the same scalability problem, Btc doubles the current number of transactions by increasing the block from 1mb to 2mb and adds a new service the segregated witnesses that allows off-the-chain private transactions, Bcc simply increases the block to 8mb for roughly 8x times more transactions.
It's a quite a bit more complicated than just increasing the block size to 8mb, actually, and in reality Bitcoin Cash ended up using one of SegWit's key changes in modified form.
The default Bitcoin signature algorithm has quadratic performance due to repeated hashing and if the block size is increased above 1MB an attacker can use this in a fairly nasty DoS attack that, worst case, might be able to fork the blockchain. The BTC/SegWit side fixes this by creating a new transaction type that moves the signatures outside the main block into a separate "witness" and uses more efficient signature hashing. The new transactions appear to older nodes as though they simply didn't require signatures, so existing software keeps working. This also fixes an annoying issue called "transaction malleability" which allows attackers to change the transaction IDs of other people's transactions; all of the data hashed to compute the transaction ID is now signed. It's apparently this malleability fix that makes off-chain payments easier.
BCH essentially replaces the original signature hashing algorithm with the SegWit one but keeps the signatures in the block. Bitcoin also has a hard cap on the number of expensive CHECKSIG operations that can be carried out to prevent DoS attacks and both sides take different approaches to raising that, neither of which is straightforward.
Just to test my understanding: Segwit essentially moves the signature in a transaction (and changes what is being signed). This fixes most "transaction malleability" problems. Transaction malleability means that one of the nodes in the bitcoin network can change some of the information in the transaction. It can't change where the money is coming from, where the money is going, or how much the transaction is for, but it can change some of the other information in the transaction.
It also appears that there were some proposals related to SegWit that advocated putting the signatures in a separate block, but the actual implemented SegWit does not do this. Instead it simply moves the signature to the end of the transaction (which allows them to fix most of the malleability issues).
There are many proposals for scaling bitcoin. One of the proposals is to increase the size of the blocks. Segwit also does this by changing how much the signature "counts" as part of the block size. This will allow blocks to be roughly 2mb in size.
Most other scaling techniques can't currently be implemented because they rely on the transaction not being malleable. If SegWit is successful, then these other scaling techniques could be used (but they don't have to be).
It appears that one of the things some people don't like about SegWit is that it was introduced as a "soft fork". This means that it won't be activated in the client unless 95% of the clients support it. Some people feel that this will never happen because some miners are against SegWit. There are also other proposals for fixing the malleability issues and so there isn't a complete consensus about how it should be done (some people appear to complain that the implementation of SegWit is too complicated).
So instead on waiting for other scaling techniques, BCH has advocated a hard fork which increases the block size, but that does not address the transaction malleability problem. Some people have suggested that increasing the block size is the only thing necessary for scaling bitcoin and that other scaling techniques are unwanted.
My understanding is that SegWit will not, in itself, solve the scaling issue other than making a small increase in the block size (effectively doubling it), but that it paves the way for other techniques later (none of which have been decided on yet, but there are working implementations of several).
Is that accurate?
More or less, except that the reason Bitcoin Cash happened is that SegWit seems almost certain to be activated at this point as a result of interesting political wranglings. The other subtle detail is that older nodes see a stripped version of SegWit blocks with the "witness" parts of the transactions removed, and it's this block that they apply the 1MB limit to. So while the signatures technically aren't part of a seperate block, they're not part of the main block either. This is why the non-witness part of transactions has to count as being more expensive.
Ah. I see! Thank you for that. It makes complete sense now. I was wondering why they had such a convoluted method for calculating the block size.
personally I think on a technical level Bcc it's a more elegant simple solution, at the moment I am completely against the Segregated Witnesses funcionality my view is that all transactions should be on the blockchain.
The good part is that the market as two options and anything could happen.
Segregated witness is nothing to do with off chain transactions. SegWit just moves some signatures around in the block so more transactions can be fitted in each block.
This does have some benefits for off chain transaction networks because it changes what parts of the block are signed and need to be verified. Off chain transaction networks can still work fine with or without segwit though.
It is related in that it addresses transaction malleability. It is not the only possible solution to that problem.
Off the chain transactions ? Then what's the point of a blockchain ? Hmmm
Blockchain remains, but it's will only contain hash of transaction script. Actual transaction script body which is heavy and take most of space in blockchain will go into separate extended block. This reduces size of transactions in main chain.
You might want to check this 5 minute segregated witness explained video:
Or this 50 minute presentation from actual Bitcoin developer and initiator of segwit:
The 5 minute video is extremely misinformed if not outright wrong. There is no such thing as an "extended block" in the current form of Segwit[0].
I've linked to a better explanation down below. It does run 12 minutes but you only need to watch the first 3 minutes for a technical answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBAG2Jp4bg
[0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/65uriv/a_simplifie...
Personally I think Bitcoin is quickly becoming the MySpace of CryptoCurrencies for example Monero offers a much better product funcionality-wise.
How so? Can you elaborate ?
first: there is no block scalability problem, the size of the block adapts to the number of current transactions.
second: privacy even for regular law obeying citizens do you really want anyone to have access to how much CryptoCurrency you have and the record of all your transactions?
third: at the moment is ASIC resistant and anyone even using a desktop or laptop can mine, personally I think this is very important for effective distribution in less developed countries.
It's literally inflation. The money supply just doubled assuming both chains continue to be going concerns.
Nope, that's the good thing about gold: you cannot fork it, it's limited, it has chemical and physical value, it cannot artificially inflate, like paper or digital money.
That's why wall street got off gold .
Summary:
"Over the last several days, we’ve examined all of the relevant issues and have decided to work on adding support for bitcoin cash for Coinbase customers. We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time."
Does this mean that customers in a short position owe Bitcoin Cash?
Matt Levine at Bloomberg wrote a fascinating piece on this yesterday:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/bitcoin-e...
It's an interesting read even if you don't care about shorts or bitcoin at all.
I wonder if this was a big part of why coinbase decided not to support BCH initially.
This really is an interesting situation. In the hours approaching the BCH fork an absolutely massive number of short positions were opened on various bitcoin exchanges, but the price remained steady. I assumed people were shorting in expectation of a crash, but the outlined scenario makes much more sense.
Similarly to the trade outlined in the article, if you already held bitcoin, you could short the equivalent amount and you would still receive bitcoin cash. This trade also had the nice side effect of your exposure to fiat currency staying flat through all the potential fluctuation.
Who was loaning BCH? What exchange could you borrow BCH on?
> What exchange could you borrow BCH on?
Anyone who borrowed BTC may have implicitly borrowed BCH. Suppose Person A owns shares in OldCo. Person B borrows those shares and sells them short to Person C. OldCo spins out NewCo. On Thursday evening, you go to bed with 1 OldCo share in your account; Friday morning, you wake up with 1 OldCo share and 1 NewCo share.
Bought Person A and Person C own OldCo shares, and so expect to receive one NewCo share. The company provides one. Who provides the other? The short seller. Presumably by buying Person A's NewCo shares. Same thing happens with dividends.
So if you borrowed BTC pre-fork and returned it post-fork, you're may find yourself owing BCH. Shorting is complicated, which is why I'm bemused by its proliferation around a blockchain that doesn't even natively support lending or interest rates.
Interesting, in a short position you already sold the borrowed BTC, you aren't really holding the BTC. So you wont get 1 BCC out of it, only whoever you sold it to.
But whoever lent the BTC would most likely want the BTC + BCC they are entitled to, even though you don't really have one to give.
how are you short on coinbase?
https://community.coinbase.com/t/short-position-fees-require... seems to indicate it's possible.
that actually seems to be gdax not coinbase.
@jchw:
actually gdax just announce they would support BCC
Then I'm really confused as to the relationship between the two.
Here's Coinbase support posting a "how do I use GADX?" article: https://community.coinbase.com/t/what-is-gdax-how-do-i-use-i...
GADX is their trading platform. They don't plan on supporting trading with BCC. That being said, no, you don't own a short position. I don't see why that would even be related to this.
Because shorting means you're borrowing BTC so you can sell it off. Since you borrowed BTC, you're the one who would have received the BCC for that BTC, so are you on the hook to give that back as well?
If I borrow your hen and it lays an egg and that hatches a chick, shouldn't I give you the chick back with the hen?
I just reread the thread and understand the discussion. I had misread the first post.
That being said, I think when margin trading on GADX no actual Bitcoin transactions are occurring. So, Coinbase is just doing accounting for the trades using internal assets. I think they could later on replay everything but treat all of the short positions as having exited directly at the split or something along those lines.
VP Ops at Coinbase
Coinbase — consumer product
GDAX — institutional/professional product
Same company, different applications.
So many people in this thread complaining about coinbase when I've had no issues with them. You people complaining about coinbase must have not been around when Mt.Gox was the only option. If you want to talk about lack of support... Now that's lack of support.
I don't see how this is a valid argument. So what if Mt.Gox was worse? The point is there are many better exchanges than both Mt.Gox and Coinbase nowadays from a fees, customer-support, and reliability perspective.
Coinbase has three major advantages: (1) incredible marketing, (2) flashy and good UX, and (3) (claimed) safety via cold storage.
The first (1) is a counter argument in my book, (2) is irrelevant, and (3) only matters if you let them control your private keys, which is stupid and the antithesis to Bitcoin.
"We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time. Once supported, customers will be able to withdraw bitcoin cash."
They are so going to get sued if the price of Bitcoin Cash crashes by the end of the year. Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months?
This is what lawyers call "conversion"[1]. A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion. The element of knowledge is found when the accused person engages in the conduct and he/she is aware of a high probability that he/she is doing so. An essential element of criminal conversion is that “the property must be owned by another and the conversion thereof must be without the consent and against the will of the party, to whom the property belongs, coupled with the fraudulent intent to deprive the owner of the property.”
It's legally equivalent to theft.[2] The typical example of conversion is renting something and then refusing to return it.
Coinbase execs, you really need to be talking to good securities lawyers.
[1] https://conversion.uslegal.com/criminal-conversion/ [2] https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1317-n...
> Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months?
When they say it will take them time to implement, it's an honest statement. They literally have to implement software, do lots of code review, check their accounting, pentesting, or at least they should be doing these things, and 5 months is an unusually short timeline. Even if they took 10% as fee to hire extra developers to work on this project, 5 months is not guaranteeable at all.
The short timelines proposed for hard-forks is one of the reasons why so many bitcoin developers have voiced caution about hard-fork proposals: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support (far right columns)
Cryptsy was quickly installing random altcoins on their servers until one of the 200 coins they installed ended up being malware (a reverse shell or whatever) and poof goes their exchange, plus or minus some other possible fraud occurring. There is value to caution and review when upgrading software systems.... much less financial systems. With backwards-compatible upgrades, you can be more certain about the net impacts. For example, if the changes were compatible with the pre-existing bitcoin rules, then none of this new coin stuff would have happened, and the whole industry could benefit from the compatible upgrades.
Not to mention that anyone can create a new bitcoin-fork.
Animats-coin could be created and supported by 2 machines. Is Coinbase obligated to support it just because you have a couple graphics cards and forked code?
If so, there are many near-worthless bitcoin variants and forked chains they aren't supporting.
Whenever someone gets rainbows in their eyes about the magic of the blockchain, I can't help but think "you can imagine the perfect, utopian future - the same one we imagined about the internet in 1994 - but none of the unintended side effects."
Just because it's inconvenient for Coinbase doesn't make it legal. That's the kind of argument which goes absolutely nowhere in court. If you want your Bitcoin Cash, sending Coinbase a registered letter demanding delivery might be appropriate. If they don't pay up quickly, you're in a good position to sue.
Coinbase doesn't have to trade Bitcoin Cash, but they do have to deliver it to the customers they owe on demand. In the world of real securities, "failure to deliver" is a big deal. It is not at the broker's option.
Before the fork they wrote:
https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/284421...Q: Do I need to withdraw my BTC from Coinbase? ... If you wish to access your coins on the UAHF chain ... you should withdraw your BTC from Coinbase to an external wallet address under your control by July 31.3 days notice. Opening an account somewhere can take weeks
You can withdraw to a paper wallet without opening an account. You generate a new keypair, initiate a withdrawal from coinbase to your public key, and then can get both XBT and BCC from the private key later.
Unacceptable behavior. They should immediately offer a way for people to access bitcoin cash or they deserve to be sued into oblivion.
Bitcoin Cash is a new coin. To the extent that it's not trying to be bitcoin proper, I'm not entirely convinced they even have to allow withdrawals at all. If I went and gave out a new coin 1:1 to everyone that possesses US dollars, they would not be obligated to pass it on to the owners of those dollars.
For multiple non-legal reasons they should, unless writing the code is too much of a burden, but there's not much justification for being picky that it takes actual dev time.
At first I was like, why a whole year?!
Then I realized there is a little less than 5 months left of 2017... Time is fucking flying!
When Ethereum Classic hit the markets Coinbase did the same, ignoring it first, then giving in, however it turned out because of missing replay protection (thanks to vitalik) Coinbase had to buy back ETC on other markets first. Feel free to draw your conclusions based on this information.
Do you think this mean they will support ethereum classic? I don't see how the two are different.
They added Ethereum after the fork while they had Bitcoin before the Bitcoin Cash fork: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-adds-support-for-ethereum...
Ah jeez you're right. Thanks for the reminder.
Good on them. Finally some integrity in the cryptocoin exchange market.
Where do I buy Bitcoin Cash today from a reputable exchange?
I'd say Bittrex is the most reputable out there.
What an inconvenient waste of time trying to be proactive and moving my BTC out of Coinbase ahead of the fork -- just like Coinbase said to. Would have been nice if they could have decided this before hand...
Why would you keep it there in the first place? History has shown us how unsafe it is to let someone else control your BTC.
I think we've got some Coinbase employees and investors taking this comment pretty hard. Oh the chilling effects.
Moving out of Coinbase took you fewer keystrokes than typing that comment.
Right, withdrawal is easy. Figuring out how to actually claim my BCC was a (figurative) eternity. Appreciate your dismissive attitude though! Bottom line, Coinbase could have made this easy. It's not like this was some random fork by some nobody faction. I want crypto coins to succeed and it won't happen as long as we have to manage our own wallets and such.
You make it sound like adding support at the level they have for their other currencies is something they can do on a whim. Unless you've worked in commercial software, that's a forgivable attitude, but it's very far from reality for a company like Coinbase that is establishing a brand of trust and stability, not chasing the latest sparkly fork (of which there are many) and saying oops sorry when they screw up by moving too fast.
"It's not like this was some random fork by some nobody faction." That's Monday-morning quarterbacking, and in fact we have no idea whether we're at halftime or end of game for BCH. Results-oriented thinking like that is one step away from cargo-culting.
"Figuring out how to actually claim my BCC was a (figurative) eternity." Right, so imagine having to solve that same problem for a million or so users in less time than it took you for yourself.
Nope, not even asking for the level of support they have for BTC/ETH/LTC. I was talking a simple ability to access/withdraw out the BCC post-fork.
I do work in consumer software and I stand by my recommendation. I'm pretty sure they wish they would have just done it to start with PR-wise. No doubt it will be a hassle for them but being willing to take on the right hassles is what inspires loyalty from consumers like me.
I don't understand how it's "Monday-morning quarterbacking". I mean it's not controversial to say this fork was a long time coming and had a solid bloc of support. Coinbase is basically implicitly agreeing here that they should have done this to start or at least publicly left it open to support BCC should it prove legitimate. It's almost like they came out against to try to make it go away "these aren't the droids you are looking for"-style.
Just for the record, I've enjoyed using GDAX/Coinbase thus far to trade the coins they do support.
We're not going to agree on this because we interpret the facts differently. We agree companies should take on only "the right hassles," but I remain far from convinced, even today, that this is one of the right ones for Coinbase.
You think "a simple ability" takes less time. I think making it simple actually takes even more time, especially when Coinbase has a history of indemnifying its customers even when it wasn't responsible for the loss (GDAX/ETH flash crash), which means that a bare-bones tool with a ton of CYA documentation isn't going to cut it for them.
You saw a "solid bloc of support." I saw a fracas of tweets, bitcoin.org posts, and /r/b* proselytizing on many sides (not just for/against BCH but also for/against the other BIPs, as well as other things unilaterally calling themselves "consensus" or "agreement"). I'm still not convinced anyone but ViaBTC is in it for real (https://www.coindesk.com/even-miners-hate-bitcoin-cash-might...).
You probably believe BCH is currently valued in the mid-$200s. I see a thin market controlled primarily by exchanges imposing extremely conservative deposit requirements (up to 20 confirmations) that happen to function nicely as supply controls as well, and while I can't predict the future, I doubt an unconstrained market would send the price upward at this point.
Remember, the point of BCH was to make day-to-day on-chain transactions a realistic, scalable proposition. We're not even close to that being a reality, even in contrived pizza-buying scenarios. I'm still concerned that this fork will make exasperated merchants nope their way out of cryptocurrencies entirely, especially when intermediaries like BitPay face the practical usability nightmare of BCH and BTC addresses being visually identical.
Bitcoin has its practical use cases that have been hard-won over nearly a decade. Ethereum's elevator pitch is ICOs. Both of them have clear reasons to exist. But Bitcoin Cash's pitch at this point is "like Bitcoin but without the network effects." I understand where it wants to go, but for now it's just a speculative vehicle, and I understand why Coinbase doesn't want to help enable that usage.
Oh but we are going to agree on this because...I'm opening my mind to what you are saying. Way too much energy behind this for you to just be some guy trying to win an argument on the Internet. Thanks for the perspectives.
:) Be well.
Can we stop with this Coinbase spam?
Question: if Coinbase never claimed the Bitcoin Cash, would there be any grounds for a lawsuit?
They don't have to claim it. Purely by controlling the addresses that held BTC at the time of the fork, Coinbase controls the BCH that magicked into existence.
The issue is that BCH belongs to the original owner of the BTC it was forked from. Despite Coinbase telling people to withdraw their BTC if they wanted the BCH a lot of people no-doubt now feel aggrieved that they're unable to access the new theoretical windfall.
How is that not bullshit though? Like, if I were a company that didn't want to take a side, had projects in the pipeline, and didn't want to have to build out infrastructure, extra warnings, and educational content for the speculators that will probably send BCH <-> XBT, I don't see why I can't tell all the BCH enthusiasts that my company won't redeem the BCH, and to send their funds out so that they can redeem the BCH they're entitled to.
It costs a lot of man hours to add infrastructure work for that, and they're setting a precedent that they'll support every single fork that people speculate with.
I personally think this is lazyman bullshit where people harp about how Coinbase being amicable with the feds are bad until they want to file suit lol. People who were knowledgeable enough about the fork but too lazy to learn how to move their Bitcoin out, not have their private keys stolen/lost, and redeem the coins on two chains without fucking up feel entitled to free money that costs Coinbase man hours and technical debt. Despite all ideals about them technically controlling the BCH, they should be able to draft a legal document placing their licensing at stake that asserts they're not claiming customer BCH and get back to answering my limit increase email.
*Disclaimer: I don't work for Coinbase or a Bitcoin company
And all it took was the threat of a lawsuit.
But four months is obviously a stall tactic when all of those other places made it available immediately.
Maybe a month for rush (but tested) development. Four months means they have other plans for the money and therefore I believe either they will revise that number or there will be a very large lawsuit. Something like criminal conversion or something.
They have around 7 million customers. If the average amount of bitcoin comes out to 0.5 bitcoin (could be more, could be less, who knows?) then that is 0.5 * 375 (current BCH price) * 7 million = around 1.3 billion USD. Maybe it averages out to quite a bit more. But they are saying they need to hold on to a billion dollars worth of assets until next year for 'safe keeping' or because its technically too hard? LOL.
Now we see how many other forks rise up and demand inclusion.
It doesn't work that way. BCC isn't just any fork. It has large miner and industry support.
... and you don't think this'll set a precedent with those miners and industry folks to support other forks?
coinbase's android app is utter shit. sorry but had to say it
What other trading platform has a good android app?
bitstamp worked pretty fine, if I don't remember wrong
lost my faith with bitcoin and ethereum due to chain split
Ripple's XRP will win
Bitcoin cash is BCH not BCC.
I originally wrote this comment because BCC has been reserved for BitConnect prior to the existence of Bitcoin Cash.
Looks like BitConnect might need to come up with a new short-name?
I’ve seen both used about equally.
You are luke-jr, aren't you?
From a Coinbase email:
"This means if there are two separate digital currencies – bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) – customers with Bitcoin stored on Coinbase will only have access to the current version of bitcoin we support (BTC). Customers will not have access to, or be able to withdraw, bitcoin cash (BCC).
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."
Bcash
I'm a blockchain money noob. From my stand point this virtual money looks like pure speculation. Nice to see that ressource limitation can be bypassed by forking. So this speculation seams doomed to me.
Do you believe that stock splits are also creating money?
They reversed stance so quickly, it seems plausible this was a calculated move to increase news coverage of Coinbase.
There was a slightly different amount of information available in the time you call "so quickly."
Any "calculated move" that involves repeated pleas to one's own customers to withdraw all their assets from one's platform to protect themselves from that move... well, you can characterize that as well as I can.
I admit that "calculated" might be a stretch, considering how far off their delivery date is. Despite that, the original announcement could have been more realistic ("we might support it soon ") but it wouldn't have made nearly as many headlines.
It does seem like they're understaffed. Maybe they were hoping the fork would wither away quickly and they wouldn't need to deal with it. As one of the largest exchanges they should have better contingency planning than that.
I hope they continue to succeed because I do like Coinbase.
If you are going to be cynical, why not go full cynic and say they were waiting to see whether the public outrage would be higher than the value of Bitcoin Cash they pilfered of their customer base.
This sounds about right.