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Update on Bitcoin Cash

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#91

Post by ilaksh »

blazamos wrote: post #28
colept wrote: post #16

Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.

VP Ops at Coinbase We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e... If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).

VP eh. Awesome that I get a chance to write to an executive. Were you in the meeting where they decided they could roll out the Bitcoin Cash updates in 4 months? If so, did you actually think that customers would not sue within a month, or did you realize that and just were too scared to say anything to the boss?

LOL. Soo many lawsuits coming. It will affect Ops. I would have helped my CEO and explained it had to get pushed out faster.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#92

Post by sowbug »

Snackchez wrote: post #83

Maybe I'm just not getting something in my slow brain, hopefully someone here can explain. How does taking out my BTC out of CoinBase ensure I will receive an equivalent amount of BCH? I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitl…

You got a lot of replies, but I don't see one critical point addressed. You said you moved from Coinbase (no internal caps) to an exchange. So we can't tell whether you'll get any BCH. If you don't know the private keys for your funds, then you can't spend those funds. You can only ask whoever has your funds to spend them on your behalf. Coinbase hasn't implemented the infrastructure to spend from anything but the main chain. We don't know whether the exchange you're using has, either.

Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#93

Post by colept »

sowbug wrote: post #81
colept wrote: post #16

Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.

Before you declare an exception to Hanlon's Razor, hear my story. Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on. Years later I still have that BTC.…

Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees."

You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.

Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff...

In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.

Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.

The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#94

Post by colept »

sputknick wrote: post #69
colept wrote: post #16

Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.

In the process of switching to Gemini. Coinbase limits are too low. I've been waiting for two months for them to raise my limit to half of what Gemini will give me from the start.

The only thing that keeps me from switching to Gemini is instant buy. I only buy the amount of Bitcoin I need to send payments immediately.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#95

Post by selectodude »

robinj6 wrote: post #80
skyisblue wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. If you had one btc before the fork, you now have one btc and one bch. I wonder what implications this has to the global economy. If we continue to fork will there be a global hyperinflation?

So people who had 10 million in BTC just made about 2.5 million dollars?

Paper winnings. It's near impossible to trade BCC right now, so any USD value you see is questionable.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#96

Post by gdudeman »

kanzure wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #82

"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." They are so going to get sued if the price of Bitcoin Cash crashes by the end of the year. Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months? This is what lawyers call "conversion"[1]. A person w…

> Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months? When they say it will take them time to implement, it's an honest statement. They literally have to implement software, do lots of code review, check their accounting, pentesting, or at least they should be doing these things, and 5 months is an unusually short timeline. Even if they took 10% as fee to hire extra developers to wor…

Not to mention that anyone can create a new bitcoin-fork.

Animats-coin could be created and supported by 2 machines. Is Coinbase obligated to support it just because you have a couple graphics cards and forked code?

If so, there are many near-worthless bitcoin variants and forked chains they aren't supporting.

Whenever someone gets rainbows in their eyes about the magic of the blockchain, I can't help but think "you can imagine the perfect, utopian future - the same one we imagined about the internet in 1994 - but none of the unintended side effects."

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#97

Post by dragonwriter »

paulddraper wrote: post #72
differentView wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you believe BTC would've been at that same value without the fork.

Right. It's like a stock split, except the company actually splits into two essentially identical competitors. No matter which competitor "wins", your assets should keep the same total value they had before.

Unless the competitors increase the whole market (increasing total value) or—as is plausible with a cryptocurrency with netomwork effects—the lack of a single clear choice reduces the overall value of the market compared to a don't clear choice that everyone uses.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#98

Post by mikekchar »

makomk wrote: post #44
elmar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are two diferent ways to solve the same scalability problem, Btc doubles the current number of transactions by increasing the block from 1mb to 2mb and adds a new service the segregated witnesses that allows off-the-chain private transactions, Bcc simply increases the block to 8mb for roughly 8x times more transactions.

It's a quite a bit more complicated than just increasing the block size to 8mb, actually, and in reality Bitcoin Cash ended up using one of SegWit's key changes in modified form. The default Bitcoin signature algorithm has quadratic performance due to repeated hashing and if the block size is increased above 1MB an attacker can use this in a fairly nasty DoS attack that, worst case, might be able to fork the blockcha…

Just to test my understanding: Segwit essentially moves the signature in a transaction (and changes what is being signed). This fixes most "transaction malleability" problems. Transaction malleability means that one of the nodes in the bitcoin network can change some of the information in the transaction. It can't change where the money is coming from, where the money is going, or how much the transaction is for, but it can change some of the other information in the transaction.

It also appears that there were some proposals related to SegWit that advocated putting the signatures in a separate block, but the actual implemented SegWit does not do this. Instead it simply moves the signature to the end of the transaction (which allows them to fix most of the malleability issues).

There are many proposals for scaling bitcoin. One of the proposals is to increase the size of the blocks. Segwit also does this by changing how much the signature "counts" as part of the block size. This will allow blocks to be roughly 2mb in size.

Most other scaling techniques can't currently be implemented because they rely on the transaction not being malleable. If SegWit is successful, then these other scaling techniques could be used (but they don't have to be).

It appears that one of the things some people don't like about SegWit is that it was introduced as a "soft fork". This means that it won't be activated in the client unless 95% of the clients support it. Some people feel that this will never happen because some miners are against SegWit. There are also other proposals for fixing the malleability issues and so there isn't a complete consensus about how it should be done (some people appear to complain that the implementation of SegWit is too complicated).

So instead on waiting for other scaling techniques, BCH has advocated a hard fork which increases the block size, but that does not address the transaction malleability problem. Some people have suggested that increasing the block size is the only thing necessary for scaling bitcoin and that other scaling techniques are unwanted.

My understanding is that SegWit will not, in itself, solve the scaling issue other than making a small increase in the block size (effectively doubling it), but that it paves the way for other techniques later (none of which have been decided on yet, but there are working implementations of several).

Is that accurate?

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#99

Post by lightedman »

untog wrote: post #73
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a lawyer, you should line up tens of unhappy Coinbase customers and start a class action.

That doesn't sound like something you do while you're concentrating on bootstrapping your own project.

That's generally not an allowed behavior by lawyers in the first place. First they must be approached by someone else who has been wronged, or the lawyer themselves must approach another firm. Otherwise, he is still free to represent himself and only himself.

Re: Update on Bitcoin Cash

#100

Post by Animats »

kanzure wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #82

"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." They are so going to get sued if the price of Bitcoin Cash crashes by the end of the year. Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months? This is what lawyers call "conversion"[1]. A person w…

> Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months? When they say it will take them time to implement, it's an honest statement. They literally have to implement software, do lots of code review, check their accounting, pentesting, or at least they should be doing these things, and 5 months is an unusually short timeline. Even if they took 10% as fee to hire extra developers to wor…

Just because it's inconvenient for Coinbase doesn't make it legal. That's the kind of argument which goes absolutely nowhere in court. If you want your Bitcoin Cash, sending Coinbase a registered letter demanding delivery might be appropriate. If they don't pay up quickly, you're in a good position to sue.

Coinbase doesn't have to trade Bitcoin Cash, but they do have to deliver it to the customers they owe on demand. In the world of real securities, "failure to deliver" is a big deal. It is not at the broker's option.

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