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

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

#361

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #228

Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled…

I read an interesting theory this morning:

Because there is greatly reduced liquidity of BCH (most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do), supply of BCH is artificially limited at the moment. Proponents of BCH can trade their BTC for BCH at a rate greater than they believe it is worth to easily pump the value and 'market cap' (most market cap stats have no measure of this 'locked supply') to make BCH appear more popular than it is at a fraction of the price that would be necessary if selling was easy. This could sway more miners to choose to mine BCH over BTC, and in doing so, actually increase the real value of BCH.

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6ooorn/small_blockers_...

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

#362

Post by dgacmu » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

SolarNet wrote: post #315

blhack wrote: post #229

Coinbase is in a bad situation here. If they set a precedent that all BTC forks will be available to their users, then they open themselves to some pretty obvious DOS attacks. 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…

> 10 new "bitcoins" could fork every day Not really. You are forgetting how the difficulty works (or simply don't understand bitcoin). You'd have to have a significant percentage of the bitcoin mining infrastructure. If you have 1% of the bitcoin mining infrastructure it would take 100x the time to mine a block, or 1000 mins, or basically half a day, that would take a week of not getting bitcoin simply to confirm the…

You can encode an immediate diff reduction as part of the hard fork. The block produced with too low a diff will make it invalid on the original chain, thus forking. It's trivial to create as many hard forks as you want.

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

#363

Post by jncraton » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #323

jncraton wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of this, but they should still have enough BTC in storage to cover the BTC in all accounts. This means they should also have BCC for each user.

That's an assumption that may or may not be true. Is there any reason why Coinbase could not be operating on a fractional reserve? Or, if we want to consider Coinbase as managing a discrete asset instead of managing deposits... Shorting stocks "loans" out a stock that technically belongs to someone else; there two "positive owners" and one "negative owner" until the position is covered. So they can also operate on a…

You are correct. However, Coinbase does state that they simply store the funds:

"Customer deposits are not sent anywhere. Unlike other financial institutions, we do not lend out customer funds. 100% of your funds are securely stored."

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/667213...

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

#364

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

milcron wrote: post #359

AgentME wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got an email plenty early this month that seemed to have a clear stance applicable to forks in general: withdraw my bitcoins before the fork if I wanted altcoins from any fork.

What date was 'early'? I didn't get the email until 4 days prior to the fork.

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by thedufer » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:13 PM UTC

ccghhjb wrote: post #343

hendzen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Property dividends are a thing. I would be quite surprised if ETrade got away with swiping property dividends from its clients.

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

#366

Post by 0xffff2 » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:15 PM UTC

duderific wrote: post #308

ChuckMcM wrote: post #269

I wonder sometimes if the origin of coinage was similarly fraught with these sorts of challenges. The history of money exhibit at the British Museum is pretty awesome and they go over some of the 'coin scams' of the day like nicking bits off the coins and remelting them into new coins, melting coins and alloying them with other metals so that they 'felt right' but were diluted. People who no longer had to be 'landed'…

Heck, you can see this in US coinage today. A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid. The cost of the metal gets to a point where it doesn't make sense to use it in the currency anymore. For example, if the metal in a quarter was worth more than $.25, you could simply melt it down and sell it for more than the face value (assuming the cost of melting etc. could be brought down at volume).

> A quarter feels like about half the weight it was when I was a kid.

I felt the same, but as far as I can tell the current quarter composition weighs 84% as much as the heaviest quarter ever produced and 90% as much as any quarter made since 1873. The quarter's composition has only changed three times in the history of the United States.

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

#367

Post by matthewbauer » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

TD-Linux wrote: post #302

matthewbauer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. You're saying that the delay was intentional?

It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjust...

Okay that sounds more reasonable. My original thought was that it's not very decentralized if all the miners can agree to stop mining at any point. Economic reasons seem much more reasonable.

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

#368

Post by xorcist » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:30 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #361

bdcravens wrote: post #228

Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled…

I read an interesting theory this morning: Because there is greatly reduced liquidity of BCH (most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do), supply of BCH is artificially limited at the moment. Proponents of BCH can trade their BTC for BCH at a rate greater than they believe it is worth to easily pump the value and 'market cap' (most market cap stats have no measure of this 'locked supply…

> most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do

It's much more than that. The exchanges that list support do not accept deposits. They won't even show you a deposit address. So you can't sell anywhere at the moment, unless you are one of the few who were awarded BCH by your exchange.

The only thing you seem to be able to do right now is to buy it for Bitcoins, not move it. There have been rumors of two Chinese exchanges accepting it, and they do indeed list deposit addresses, but it does not seem to work.

Yet at the same time, media everywhere (including this very thread), hype up the great market cap. I guess at least someone got what they came for.

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

#369

Post by woodman » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:32 PM UTC

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #320

woodman wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... initially drawn to btc as a speculative vehicle? Or is it a matter of principle to hold forever? I got involved with btc when it was in the single digits, the crowd was very different then - cryptoanarchists. So your call to "diversify your investments" sounds to me much more like "diversify your politics", which is obviously a silly thing to tell somebody - especially somebody whose politics is any anarcho fla…

As someone that deals with political parties and regulatory regimes in many countries at once, diversify your political isn't silly at all. Or at least I feel like being unsubscribed from one countries politics has only given me advantages, even if it is less common to not be married to a political flavor.

> ...diversify your political isn't silly at all.

It is, as most political differences are rooted in mutually exclusive ideas. If you are advocating for simply being open to considering alternative positions and measuring them against your own present position - then I agree with you, that is nice. But I would describe that as "diversify your politics", I'd describe that as being intellectually honest.

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

#370

Post by danmaz74 » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 11:43 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #228

Big point to remember: the current high price is artificial. There are only a few exchanges selling BCH, and they aren't accepting deposits. The only sellers are those who had BTC there prior to August 1. So it's a sellers market. There's a ton of demand to sell. Once those deposits are enabled, you'll see a flood of dumping, and the price will crash. So let's say Coinbase allows BCH withdrawals. Unless they enabled…

> the current high price is artificial.

That's absolutely clear to me, and I was dying to find a way to short it. I just found out that plus500 allows that... I don't like that platform, but I just placed my shorts (even if now it's "only" $500)