Isn't this screaming for lawsuits in this thread driving the idea of an currency independent of any central authority ad absurdum?
Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
341–350 of 429 posts
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#342Earlier 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…
> 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. That's the idea. However, you have to understand that i…
> From your friend's perspective, if they sell $100K worth of bitcoin, then is it possible that they might end getting on the radar of the govt and could be on hook for more than $100K?
You really have to be on the radar if you plan on reasonably enjoying that kind of wealth. There are plenty of legit ways of minimizing the tax burden of that kind of investment.
Calling the top and bottom is a fools game. Diversification simply helps protect an entire asset class/sector from ruining you.
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#343Coinbase 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. 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd. I think it's pretty obvious that they're going to just issue the BCH to people eventually. Here's another thought experiment: I a…
Yes we expect Coinbase to support them all. Public companies have complicated stock actions like spinoffs (i.e. "Forking" the company), rights offerings, scrip offerings, stock dividends, etc. Do you think ETrade gets to not give their users the results of such actions because it would be complex to implement?
All of those actions are contractually specified. If Coca-Cola decided to go off-script and send a rubber ducky to each shareholder, ETrade would not be responsible for receiving 3 million rubber duckies and sending one to each shareholder that they hold stock for.
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#344Coinbase 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. 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day. Are we really going to expect coinbase to support them all? That's absurd. I think it's pretty obvious that they're going to just issue the BCH to people eventually. Here's another thought experiment: I a…
There's a really easy technical solution to this - let me have a hot wallet with coinbase and when i want to withdraw my bitcoins i can choose to have them hand off the private key for the account to me with bitcoins as of the block I deposited it
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won't be that large for long. Only reason why it's so high is the few places you can sell it aren't accepting BCH deposits; the only way you can sell is if you had BTC there prior to August 1. There's a ton of pent up demand to sell; once those exchanges allow deposits, there will be a ton of dumping and the price will fall substantially.
That makes it worse for Coinbase. They could be held liable for losses incurred because people couldn't access their BCH to sell at the top. This is the sort of thing which may involve Coinbase in litigation over whether SEC and CFTC rules on "fails to deliver" apply to them. When a real broker does something like this, they're on the hook for customer losses.
No, they won't. You can't deposit into those exchanges yet, so if those Coinbasers had those BCH in hand, ready to sell, they wouldn't be able to anyways. In other words, if you didn't have BTC on those exchanges prior to August 1, BCH is an unsaleable asset, so that price is not relevant.
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#346Big 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. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled…
While I agree that the current price is not necessarily reflective of an open market, it's equally unclear which direction that represents. Remember, every off exchange BTC now has a counterpart on both prongs of the fork. Which side will sell for which side when the market clears remains to be seen.
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, now you have a stateful application running in the cloud, vs an immutable blockchain. And that implicitly means you are now trusting authoritative nodes to hold that state. This is basically moving closer and closer to just a bunch of nodes running a database with some consensus mechanism, rather than an actual blockchain. (I'm not personally sold that this is actually a distinction that matters - after all, we…
It's not THAT hard to run a full node, even with 32MB blocks. But for people that want to kickstart a local node, they don't need the entire history if there's a trusted checkpoint mechanism. So they can participate, validate new blocks coming in, while they never or slowly download the historical blockchain. A hash chain of every block is only a few MB so it's not that big of a deal to make sure the chain is immutab…
> It's not THAT hard to run a full node, even with 32MB blocks.
Not at present, but if you increase the block size then you ramp that up pretty fast. Let's say there's a block every 9 minutes (nominally 10 but the network is reactive to increased hash power so it's a bit less in reality). That's 58400 blocks per year, which with a 32 MB block size would translate to 1,868,800 MB per year.
A growth rate of 2 TB per year would very quickly take you past the point where "anyone can have a copy". Yes, it would still be feasible for power-users who could dedicate a whole HDD or some NAS space to it, but that's implicitly conceding the whole "anybody can have a copy" point, and the growth would still be continuing unabated.
And the problem is - Bitcoin's transaction rate is currently so slow that 32 MB is not really a big enough block size. Going from 7 tx/sec to 224 tx/sec is still pitiful for a global network, again Visa does 50k tx/sec at peak.
I agree that it seems highly plausible that some form of "checkpointing" mechanism could be securely implemented.
In fact if you "trust the network" then there's no reason to download the blockchain at all, you can run the Electrum client. And if you think all the nodes are lying to you... how do you ever get the blockchain securely in the first place, regardless of a checkpoint mechanism?
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#348Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#349Big 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. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled…
Regardless of the price, an exchange cannot seize customer assets by giving them 10 days notice for withdrawal. It doesn't matter if it's a separate currency - we have things resembling this in public markets, like stock splits. It doesn't matter if everyone can fork the cryptocurrency, that doesn't change the principle of a customer's asset. What Coinbase should have done is this: 1. Stood their ground on not suppor…
I think about it in a different way. The fact that a certain amount of BTC is also the same amount of BCC is tied to a specific way of owning bitcoins (i.e. "physical" bitcoins in a wallet).
But when you buy a certain amount of BTC on coinbase, you will just buy that abstract amount, there is no wallet tied to you, in the same way that when you have money in a bank you don't own any specific bill. The bank may not even have that amount, at least not in the form of physical cash.
To continue the analogy, let's say that the Central Bank says "in order to fight fake bills, whoever brings old 20 USD bills will get back a new 20 USD bill PLUS a 20 EUR bill." If you have 1000 USD in a bank, are you automatically entitled to 1000 EUR, or are you supposed to get first the bills from the bank ? And if you do, should the bank give you old bills or can it give you the new bills ?
Re: Bitcoin Cash Soars to $700, Coinbase Customers Threaten to Sue
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm sure that a lawyer can spin in circles arguing semantics over what is bitcoin , the stance that the SEC has taken is that cryptocurrencies are commodity-assets, and therefore any derived assets (forks, etc) are the property of the asset owner.
In what way is a fork a derived asset? Let's say an advertiser, unprompted, decided to send a free DVD to everyone who owns a sailboat. Your sailboat is in storage at a large marina that stores hundreds of sailboats, so the publisher drops a big stack of these DVDs in front of the marina office. Is the ownership of the marina obligated to accept these DVDs and mail one to each owner at its own cost? Receiving unsolic…
Interesting analogy! Compare to the one I gave [1]. As you've described it here, I would agree that they don't have an obligation to mail the DVDs out. However, if:
A) The marina owner had entered into a fiduciary relationship with you regarding the possession of your boat to your benefit, and
B) The DVDs were sent to the fiduciary with instructions to be given to the boat owners, and
C) A reasonable person would believe that the boat owner would regard the DVD to have enough value to care about,
Then the marina owner would be obligated to at least ensure that the boat owners can access their DVD, if they wish to, for some reasonable period (say, 60 days). For example, by leaving it with the boat or dropping it in the boat owners' locker at the harbor office, or informing them of their property with the next scheduled communication (in a way that leaves them 60 days etc).
[1] I know "comparing a comparison", but here ya go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913261