[Animats]

"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 who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion. The element of knowledge is found when the accused person engages in the conduct and he/she is aware of a high probability that he/she is doing so. An essential element of criminal conversion is that “the property must be owned by another and the conversion thereof must be without the consent and against the will of the party, to whom the property belongs, coupled with the fraudulent intent to deprive the owner of the property.”

It's legally equivalent to theft.[2] The typical example of conversion is renting something and then refusing to return it.

Coinbase execs, you really need to be talking to good securities lawyers.

[1] https://conversion.uslegal.com/criminal-conversion/ [2] https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1317-n...

[kanzure]

> 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 work on this project, 5 months is not guaranteeable at all.

The short timelines proposed for hard-forks is one of the reasons why so many bitcoin developers have voiced caution about hard-fork proposals: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support (far right columns)

Cryptsy was quickly installing random altcoins on their servers until one of the 200 coins they installed ended up being malware (a reverse shell or whatever) and poof goes their exchange, plus or minus some other possible fraud occurring. There is value to caution and review when upgrading software systems.... much less financial systems. With backwards-compatible upgrades, you can be more certain about the net impacts. For example, if the changes were compatible with the pre-existing bitcoin rules, then none of this new coin stuff would have happened, and the whole industry could benefit from the compatible upgrades.

[gdudeman]

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."

[Animats]

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.

[cbr]

Before the fork they wrote:

    Q: Do I need to withdraw my BTC from Coinbase?

    ... If you wish to access your coins on the UAHF
    chain ... you should withdraw your BTC from Coinbase
    to an external wallet address under your control by
    July 31.

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/284421...

[jbverschoor]

3 days notice. Opening an account somewhere can take weeks

[cbr]

You can withdraw to a paper wallet without opening an account. You generate a new keypair, initiate a withdrawal from coinbase to your public key, and then can get both XBT and BCC from the private key later.

[gafferongames]

Unacceptable behavior. They should immediately offer a way for people to access bitcoin cash or they deserve to be sued into oblivion.

[Dylan16807]

Bitcoin Cash is a new coin. To the extent that it's not trying to be bitcoin proper, I'm not entirely convinced they even have to allow withdrawals at all. If I went and gave out a new coin 1:1 to everyone that possesses US dollars, they would not be obligated to pass it on to the owners of those dollars.

For multiple non-legal reasons they should, unless writing the code is too much of a burden, but there's not much justification for being picky that it takes actual dev time.