Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that was a pretty crappy attitude considering BCC is trading at $200 right now. I imagine a lot of early bitcoin buyers used coinbase and are sitting on like 10+ btc.

Not really cool to be ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from your users.

View on HN

If you don't hold your keys, you're subject to the decisions of those who do. Coinbase is a good enough steward of most people's bitcoins that it's a fine trade-off.

keeping 10+btc in coinbase is immensely stupid.

don't keep your bitcoin in exchanges. it defeats three of the main appeals of bitcoin: autonomy, trustlessness, anonymity

> anonymity

Bitcoin itself isn't anonymous at all: All transactions are public. Only via a Laundry you can cover up your tracks.

Zerocoin and Zcash were created to fix that.

transactions are public but if no one knows that a public key is yours it's difficult to trace. and like you said, there's tools to anonymize your bitcoin transactions completely

As soon as you buy/sell something, someone will know your public key.

The laundry scheme isn't tied to Bitcoin, that's why I think it's wrong to say that one of Bitcoins advantages is anonimity.

>As soon as you buy/sell something, someone will know your public key.

So make a new key, and tumble the Bitcoins until you feel safe again.

Since all transactions are public, he can easily follow the tracks to your new public key.

Tumbling is supposed to make tracking non-trivial. Anyways you can always convent to another coin, especially one with more anonymity, and then back to Bitcoin.

EDIT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918545 This just started getting popular if you want to talk more about tumbling.

> Not really cool to be ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from your users.

Serious question: under what legal theory (not loose analogy) is the BCH corresponding to a wallet held by Coinbase property of Coinbase's users and not Coinbase?

Security laws. Stuff like this happens all the times in spinoffs and the rules are very clear about who is entitled to the proceeds.

> Security laws.

That's hardly specific.

> Stuff like this happens all the times in spinoffs

There's a reason I specifically excluded loose analogies.

> the rules are very clear about who is entitled to the proceeds.

And the specific rules that specifically apply to a fork of a cryptocurrnecy and a firm providing wallet services like Coinbase are...what, precisely?

Perhaps general securities laws are written in a way which encompasses this scenario, but I'm asking about the specific applicable laws that cover the situation at hand.

Sounds a bit harsh. He's suggesting securities law is a good place to start; a reasonable thing that adds something to the discussion. Consider hiring a paralegal to research the issue for you and write you a well-documented brief to meet your standards of proof.

That's idiotic, securities do not spontaneously split on their own. In a split, agents agree upon how it should be carried out, specifically to avoid this problem.

In what way is deciding not to support BCC stealing?

It's more akin to a forex brokerage deciding not to support EUR when it first came out over the lira. You can easily use someone else, Coinbase is hardly the only service around.

It's more like HP shares splitting into HP and Agilent, and your brokerage deciding that it won't track your ownership stake in Agilent and not giving you any further access to obtain your Agilent stock.

Under these circumstances, you'd have serious reservations about passively parking any assets with that particular broker...

That's one possible analogy. Another analogy would be: an unrelated third-party decides to give, to everyone who has HP shares, an equivalent number of shares in a new company. In that case, a broker would be under no obligation to give you these new shares.

Which analogy is the best one depends on your point of view on this debate.

> a broker would be under no obligation to give you these new shares.

No obligation would exist, but I'd rather take my business to a broker who would do so, given the choice.

How about a third-party company that awards a free trip to a timeshare resort (some obligations apply) to every HP shareholder?

Correct. I have not studied securities law but I don't think Coinbase's users have any recourse claiming their BCC and Coinbase decides their stance is that it was always theirs as they held the relevant private keys.

This analogy doesn't work because people could've transferred their Bitcoin to a personal wallet while the same can't be said of stocks.

Actually... with many brokerages, you can still obtain actual paper stock certificates -- it's just that the overhead and fees to do that make it highly unattractive.

Furthermore: It is possible to directly transfer stocks from one brokerage account (similar to a wallet) to another at a different brokerage without having to liquidate assets.

I don't know if you have a historical example of that happening but it would most likely be illegal to accept lira but not EUR.

I don't have an actual historical example, it was more of a thought experiment.

Illegal where? Perhaps inside the Eurozone but that wouldn't be enforceable anywhere else.

If you have pre-fork BTC on Coinbase, you have no way of capturing its value as BCC since you don't own the wallet.

You had a way to capture its value as BCC by withdrawing the BTC to your wallet - it's not a surprise, and it was communicated by Coinbase before the split.

In your example, it is like everyone who has EUR being entitled to 1:1 notes of a newly-created currency called lira, with owners simply entering their EUR notes' serial numbers and being credited the lira.

Your "forex brokerage" then decides they're "not going to mess with this newfangled currency", leaving you none the wiser with how they're handling the newly created funds if at all.

If it goes up, they could shrug and say that they had the serial numbers so it was theirs the whole time. If it crashes, they could credit everyone the decreased value of the lira out of money they made by selling off earlier and pocket the rest. (Or take option A and pocket all of it, if the 'good' PR is not worth the slightly decreased profits.)

Considering the prices people end up having gotten "locked-in" on after price fluctuations when using Coinbase, this wouldn't even be "far-fetched" for them so much as par for the course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com