As most of us Bitcoin holders know, Coinbase shafted everyone holding bitcoin in Coinbase wallets as they decided not to support the hard fork earlier this week.
Consequently, there was an exodus of Bitcoin off the exchange in the days leading up to the fork as people scrambled to get their Bitcoin to an exchange that would give them the equal amount of Bitcoin Cash. I was part of that and thankfully the transfer I made on Monday morning completed by Monday evening (took roughly 6 hours) and I now have my BTC and BCC on Bittrex.
I had a conversation with someone on here yesterday about Coinbase and their decision and he had even heard a rumor about Coinbase users who got screwed organizing some class action suit to make Coinbase pay up and support the fork. I had wondered what their reasoning was behind not supporting it...so this morning I woke up and found the following message in my inbox from Coinbase. It's sort of vague and it sounds like they're defending their decision to shaft their Bitcoin holders, but then the content of the email does a complete 180 and says that they will support it....eventually. Here's the email content below:
"Dear Coinbase customer,
We wanted to give our customers an update on the recent Bitcoin hard fork. You can read more about what a digital currency fork is here:
https://blog.coinbase.com/what-is-a-bitcoin-fork-cba07fe73ef1
Forks enable innovation and improvements to digital currency and we believe that we will see an increasing number of forks in the future. We expect this to be a vibrant and innovative community.
When a digital currency forks, it creates a new digital asset. Adding new digital assets to Coinbase must be approached with caution. Not every asset is immediately safe to add to Coinbase from a technical stability, security, or compliance point of view.
Our top priority is the safety of customer funds and we spend extensive time designing, building, testing and auditing our systems to ensure that the digital asset we support remains safe and secure. We may not always be first in adding an asset, but if we do, you can be sure that we’ve invested significant time and care into supporting it securely. We believe this is the best approach for us to maintain customer trust.
In the case of bitcoin cash, we made clear to our customers that we did not feel we could safely support it on the day it was launched. For customers who wanted immediate access to their bitcoin cash, we advised them to withdraw their bitcoin from the Coinbase platform. However, there are several points we want to make clear for our customers:
Both bitcoin and bitcoin cash remain safely stored on Coinbase.
Customers with balances of bitcoin at the time of the fork now have an equal quantity of bitcoin cash stored by Coinbase.
We operate by the general principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from hard forks or other unexpected events.
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 made this decision based on factors such as the security of the network, customer demand, trading volumes, and regulatory considerations.
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. We'll make a determination at a later date about adding trading support. In the meantime, customer bitcoin cash will remain safely stored on Coinbase.
Thank you,
Coinbase Team"
Kinda vague sounding isn't it? So it sounds like they have decided to support BCC BUT they won't make it available to their Bitcoin holders until January 1, 2018. But they assure the customer that their BCC will be there safe and sound until it becomes available NEXT YEAR.
I've got to wonder if they made this decision out of fear of a class action lawsuit or they just saw the volume of currency (predictably) leaving their exchange just before the fork. I know they listed their reasons in the email but they sound lame and cooked up by a PR group.
I have no plan to sell my BCC any time soon but it's nice to have that option at least since I've got it stored somewhere other than Coinbase. To everyone who got stuck with Coinbase holding their Bitcoin through the fork, I am very happy you all will eventually be compensated. Sadly you can't access it for another several months, but I guess better late than never.