Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#271

Post by pera » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #242

pera wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing confusing, your reasoning is simply unsound: the market price (not the value ) of some traded altcoin is completely irrelevant to Bitcoin. Even the price of Bitcoin itself is irrelevant to the Bitcoin protocol. There is no law, anywhere in the world, mandating cryptocurrency exchanges to adopt altcoins after they reach some price point, and exchanges are not obligated to trade new altcoins either (wh…

> why exactly should it matter that Bitcoin Cash is being traded somewhere else for X% of the current price of Bitcoin? It simply doesn't. Because Coinbase is keeping the coins the customers could have used to gain the X%?

1) In the same way how a bank use your cash deposits to do whatever they want with those bills, Coinbase can do the exact same thing because they never promised to their clients that they, the clients, were the owners of some private keys. This is basically the end of the story here.

2) Coinbase never said that they would adopt Bitcoin Cash. If these customers were really interested in doing some sort of investment they could have withdrawn their funds somewhere else months ago. Scared of using Bitcoin? then don't! sell your btcs for fiat and transfer it to your bank account, then transfer that to some other exchange that decided to adopt Bitcoin Cash.

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#272

Post by blhack » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

aparadja wrote: post #263

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the btc nouveaux rich, help me understand something I see reoccurring among my other btc-rich friends. Generally, when you're up big (and in some cases extremely wealthy), you diversify your investments in order to preserver your wealth. However, almost without exception my btc friends are such believers that they are holding on for the ride forever. Is it just that the risk-averse were initially drawn to b…

I think the parent comment is just a hypothetical situation, and blhack isn't actually a bitcoin millionaire.

Just to clarify, yeah. Definitely not a bitcoin millionaire.

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#273

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

aparadja wrote: post #263

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the btc nouveaux rich, help me understand something I see reoccurring among my other btc-rich friends. Generally, when you're up big (and in some cases extremely wealthy), you diversify your investments in order to preserver your wealth. However, almost without exception my btc friends are such believers that they are holding on for the ride forever. Is it just that the risk-averse were initially drawn to b…

I think the parent comment is just a hypothetical situation, and blhack isn't actually a bitcoin millionaire.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#274

Post by lawn » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:19 PM UTC

pera wrote: post #271

lawn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why exactly should it matter that Bitcoin Cash is being traded somewhere else for X% of the current price of Bitcoin? It simply doesn't. Because Coinbase is keeping the coins the customers could have used to gain the X%?

1) In the same way how a bank use your cash deposits to do whatever they want with those bills, Coinbase can do the exact same thing because they never promised to their clients that they, the clients, were the owners of some private keys. This is basically the end of the story here. 2) Coinbase never said that they would adopt Bitcoin Cash. If these customers were really interested in doing some sort of investment t…

1) Banks can not do whatever they want...

2) Months ago? Oh, you mean a couple of days before the fork when Coinbase announced they wouldn't support Bitcoin Cash?

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#275

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:20 PM UTC

bdonlan wrote: post #42

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?

How about draw the line at a dollar value. Say ten dollars per coin. It's actually a pretty simple issue to solve.

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#276

Post by Spivak » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:21 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #254

thefalcon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't Timmy from accounting splitting off from Apple. This is the iPad division splitting off from Apple. If I'm holding Apple stock, I sure as hell expect to end up holding iPad stock in the event of a split.

No, this is the iPad division quitting en masse and starting their own company together. You don't get shares in that.

Okay let's bring this metaphor back around. This is the iPad division quitting and issuing 'iPad' stock to all current owners of Apple stock. But your broker, who is holding your Apple stock on your behalf, is preventing you from collecting your new iPad stock.

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#277

Post by yebyen » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

PretzelPirate wrote: post #66

yebyen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make anything infeasible today. But if you think both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are going to be around in 20 years, and you want to support both, now you've just added 800% to your annual storage growth rate. (Assuming that BCC always mines full blocks, which I will admit seems unlikely) I have to be honest, I was keeping a cold wallet with some ~1-2 BTC in it until the price reached record high territory i…

Syncing the blockchain is optional, unless you store your coins in a wallet generated by a full node. Even then, things such as UTXO commitments would make syncing the current state almost instantaneous, though it would either requiring pulling the commitment from multiple third parties or having the protocol updated to require a UTXO commitment every Nth block.

I thought the protocol required you to have the keys in hand while scanning the block chain, in order to be sure that all addresses that were generated with your keys can be recovered.

I don't know how I reconcile that with clients like electrum, is that using an implementation of UTXO? Does this just keep a record of any unspent transaction outputs at any given time, scan them, and try your keys on all of them?

I think you can do a similar trick with bitcoin core if you have all of the blocks, but you have a new wallet.dat. You can delete the index and it will regenerate it with the new wallet in mind, recovering all of your unspent transactions.

(You do not need to literally download all of the blocks again, unless you actually don't have them anymore. It is sufficient to rescan them. But this takes time too, and it does require that you must store a copy of the chain somewhere on an ongoing basis.)

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#278

Post by vetrom » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:25 PM UTC

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#279

Post by verbatim » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #275

bdonlan wrote: post #42

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?

How about draw the line at a dollar value. Say ten dollars per coin. It's actually a pretty simple issue to solve.

How do you determine the dollar value if there aren't solid exchanges where people are buying and selling the coin?

Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue

#280

Post by rmah » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 7:28 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #181

kijin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So doing even 1000/sec means around 1.8Mbps (plus overhead) just to get the flow of transactions. Huh, maybe we should come up with a cryptocurrency where you are awarded new blocks for the storage and bandwidth you contribute to the effort, rather than for how many hashes you can calculate per second. After all, if we're hoping to handling transactions on the scale of Visa, and we don't like centralization, we nee…

They don't need to store everything. All that's needed is the list of addresses and balances (UTXOs), and the last few blocks. A hash chain of 10 years of 10 minute blocks is only a few MB, so it should be something we can distribute reliably. UTXOs are a couple GB but will grow.

There are no balances in bitcoin. It's all deltas.