Live data from Hacker News

Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

blog.coinbase.com

11–20 of 304 posts

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#11

All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Pardon the naive question, but does this mean Coinbase users who held Bitcoin have essentially "doubled their money"?

Sort of. They now hold as much BCH as they had BTC on August 1st. However, BTC is worth significantly more than BCH in terms of dollars currently. The gain is more like ~20% in dollars.

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#14

All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Pardon the naive question, but does this mean Coinbase users who held Bitcoin have essentially "doubled their money"?

An "equal balance of Bitcoin Cash", as in 1000BTC becomes joined by 1000BCH. BCH is right now worth about 1/10th the value of BTC, so people have 110%ed their money.

Also, people who just had money sitting around in a private wallet on the blockchain—that is, outside of any exchange—have also 110%ed their money; there's nothing special about Coinbase, it happened for any and all BTCs that existed on 2017-08-01.

(What is special is the accounts at the other exchanges, who have thusfar mostly not provided their users with access to their equivalent BCH gains. It can be argued that the gains were made to the exchange's float, rather than to the users' accounts, so the BCH isn't "inherently" owned by the depositors, any more than capital gains of leveraged investments using a bank's liabilities are owed to the depositors of said bank. Really, since this "debt" has no (legal or smart-) contractual existence, it's up to social norms whether individual exchanges capitulate and hand over the BCH gains they've accrued.)

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#16
post #5

I wonder how much money Coinbase employees, friends and family made by insider trading on this announcement. Gotta love unregulated markets!

Exactly the first thought that came to my mind.

BCH up 30%. I wonder how many Coinbase employees bought BCH throughout this past month.

Also. it's easily predictable that introducing a new currency will temporarily affect the other currencies negatively.

Very gray area.

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#17
post #5

I wonder how much money Coinbase employees, friends and family made by insider trading on this announcement. Gotta love unregulated markets!

That's actually consistent with other currencies though. You can inside trade on forex markets.

Re: Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase

#20
post #13
post #5

I wonder how much money Coinbase employees, friends and family made by insider trading on this announcement. Gotta love unregulated markets!

Real talk though. Why does it matter? No skin off my back.

Are you looking for an explanation for existence of insider trading laws?
Post reply on HN