[grubles]

That doesn't explain listing Bitcoin Cash (Bcash) - an altcoin that shares its mining algorithm with Bitcoin but only has a very small amount of hash rate backing it. Any small Bitcoin miner can decide at any moment to switch to mining Bitcoin Cash and cause block reorgs or mine blocks with no transactions at all.

A similar event actually happened with another asset they offer - Ethereum Classic.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-classic-51-attack-th...

[nostrademons]

Much of this is because of forks - since they offered Bitcoin before the BCH fork (and presumably ETH before the ETC fork), all of their customers who owned one of these before the fork also own the new currency. So they have to support custody for the currencies anyway (unless they want to deal with angry customers saying "What happened to my BCH! Rightfully I own it"), and if they don't support trading they'll get angry customers that say "Why can't I sell my BCH?!?". (This is aggravated by potentially needing to send that BCH off to another exchange, potentially not in the U.S, with worse regulatory compliance, in order to sell.) So most of the work needed to support it has to be done anyway to remain in legal compliance, and it's a small amount of additional work for a large benefit to support trading.

[grubles]

That doesn't explain the favoritism for BCH over the multitude of other forks (some worth $50-$100 per token) though. Why no Bitcoin Gold listing?

[nostrademons]

Sure enough, there are angry customers accusing Coinbase of stealing their Bitcoin Gold:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7jtlgz/coinbase_s...

IIRC BCH and ETC forked before BTG. They probably did two of them and then asked themselves "Why are we doing this again?"

[hollerith]

Huh, I would've thought that since people will pay over 300 usd for one Bitcoin Cash coin (according to 3 web sites I just sampled), there would always be plenty of miners competing for them.

[wmf]

BCH is and will be mined proportionately to its price; since its price is far lower than BTC it also has far lower security.

[hollerith]

OK, but I would've guessed that the reward for hijacking BCH's blockchain would be proportionally lower.

And please keep in mind the context of my first comment: I was replying to the assertion that the mere fact that Coinbase continues to let its customers trade in BCH is evidence that Coinbase is run by idiots.

[TylerE]

The thing with those silly altcoints is that there really isn't much market liquidity. Even if you were able to steal a large number of them, any attempt to convert them into something useful (i.e. dollars) with crash the price.

[wmf]

Yeah, it's cheap to attack BCH but there's little benefit to doing so. Whether that makes BCH safe to trade or a reckless shitcoin is a matter of opinion.

[flarex]

The infrastructure to carry out that attack against BCH would cost around a billion dollars in mining equipment and power. Not exactly what you would call a small miner. BCH also has rolling 10 block checkpoints so max you could reorg would be 10 blocks or < 2 hours of transactions.

In reality there is nowhere you could rent this hashpower and miners that do have it would never risk the legal, social and monetary consequences to rollback 2 hours of transactions.

[grubles]

That infrastructure exists already. It just takes a pool's operations to be compromised (in whatever manner you devise) in order to redirect its hash rate. Keep in mind we're talking about small Bitcoin pools here. Not even the larger ones.