[mikeash]

Coinbase users don't have a private key for their Coinbase balance. They have an account with Coinbase, and Coinbase has their own private keys for their internal wallets. When you withdraw money from Coinbase, you're asking them to use their private keys to sign a transaction sending bitcoins to an address you specify.

What users could have done was withdraw their Coinbase balance into their own wallet, then they'd have coins on both forks. This had to be done before the fork happened, though. Now that it has, anyone whose coins were in Coinbase at the time of the fork is at the mercy of Coinbase.

[encoderer]

Worth mentioning that they notified users before the fork.

[fauigerzigerk]

Oh, I see. That's unfortunate. Thanks for explaining.

[chii]

Users of coinbase have no real right to complain because they have given up their control of their bit coin when they sign up for coin base. Unless this wasn't made clear by coin base at the beginning, i don't see how the law suit has any legs.

[mikeash]

They're giving up control of their bitcoin for specific purposes. Coinbase can't just do whatever they feel like with it, any more than your bank can one day just declare "Hey, we decided to keep all of your deposits, FOAD, thanks."

[chii]

may be i'm misunderstanding the nature of the bitcoin fork, but i see it the same as owning foreign currency. IF you banked some US dollars, you can't turn around and say you'd like to get it back out as Euros without paying some kind of exchange rate.