Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

They had the opportunity to move their funds and plenty of notice.

And Coinbase was pretty good about getting pretty much all of the massive exodus of coins out of their system and out of cold storage in time.

And they were pretty explicit that they wouldn't be supporting the BCC chain. I get it people are upset about possibly missing out on money, but Coinbase handled this about as good as they could.

I mean, I was able get mine from Coinbase 3 hours before their deadline, and it only took a few minutes for it to pop up, and another 20 minutes to get the confirmations. I was considering just leaving them on there, but decided against it at the last minute, so I'm glad the '12 hour delays for Coinbase withdrawals' wasn't true.

I do regret not informing others I know about the fork, though. They most likely still have their coins on Coinbase.

No they didn't. They could have offered withdrawals of BCC, eliminating all uncertainty. That would be handling it "best". Or even a clear policy as to under which circumstances they will offer BCC would be better. (If they said they'd do withdrawals if the price stays over 0.1BTC, that'd have placated a lot of people.)

Giving notice so as to not totally screw customers is sort of the least they could do. How they get any sort of praise for this is bizarre.

Even the exhanges that support just about every currency out there still don't allow deposits/withdraws of BCC right now. There really is a lot of uncertainty around this whole situation, and due to the nature of a split a mistake in one of the coins can cause the user to lose both of them. It's not an area that I want my services rushing into and making mistakes.

If I were in Coinbase's position, I'd make sure that I'm doing everything to fully support and secure the currencies that I officially support, and maybe support some forks later if there is massive demand or there are more stable/secure methods of handling it. I mean right now the biggest "wallets" for BCC are rushed, filled with bugs, and have significant issues in some areas.

If they had said "we will allow you to withdraw BCC" and they didn't allow it right away, people would be significantly more upset (rightfully so in my opinion). At least the way they handled it they clearly and publicly announced that if you wanted to deal with BCC, you should move your funds out of Coinbase, and they gave multiple notifications over multiple days about this.

And mind you, they did offer a clear explanation of when they will offer BCC, They won't. That's about as clear as you can get. They might change that in the future, but you can't say they didn't warn you if they never do.

Allowing BCC withdrawal doesn't mean it has to happen day one. But they could have said "within x days we will offer BCC withdrawl". That is better than they did.

Explain how you'd lose both coins? (If you mean 'well they could rush a code change and lose all their money', yes that's a risk. They shouldn't rush it.) The BCC chain has 2 way replay protection (granted, late addition) - but if it didn't, then Coinbase should have actively moved coins on BCC to prevent replays.

And if they "might", then it's unclear. That's just saying they're going to wait and see if BCC is popular enough. Instead they should have defined criteria of what popular enough is, and that'd have put to rest people's concerns.

All I'm objecting to is that "they handled it the best", which is clearly not the case.

4 days on Coinbase is not enough time. The transactions there are unbelievably slow. It took me 2 days to transfer my bitcoin away, and this was a month ago. I can only imagine how slow it was during this fork process.

I bought some bitcoins on July 28th or so, and it took two hours for the transaction to appear on the blockchain.

Coinbase put withdrawal limits on how much BTC could be transferred in a day. I emailed support so many times but no response, and in the end, I couldn't get it all out.

4 days is not plenty of notice before you loose out on a possibly significant amount of funds.

It's still no excuse for Coinbase to hold onto something that is not theirs.

Hahaha. You try this as any supplier of any service advertising custody of anything: "We will grab what would otherwise be yours, but as a result of our custody can be made to be ours. Because $WORDS"

There's nobody grabbing anything, if you find evidence that Coinbase is transacting BCC with customers' funds when they said they simply were not supporting the fork, please share with the group!

You are right and I am sorry. "Withholding" sounded somehow less poetic, I guess.

There's no difference between trading the BCC or just throwing them into the trash.

Yes there is? One way is an active investment in the "new thing" and blatantly dishonest (would rightly get you sued,) and the other is exactly like voting "no-confidence."

Here, I'll take your side: there is no difference between your spending time to support a thing, and your not expending any labor on the thing. How do you like that?

You might get them at a later date. Happened with Ethereum classic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com