
Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase - wlj
https://blog.coinbase.com/buy-sell-send-and-receive-bitcoin-cash-on-coinbase-65f1b2c7214b
======
twodave
Why is anyone surprised by this? Coinbase sent an email out months ago saying
they'd do this by Jan 1, 2018.

    
    
        Dear Coinbase customer, 
        
        ...
        We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by 
        January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge 
        during that time.
        ...
        
        Thank you,
        
        Coinbase Team
    

Am I crazy?

Edit: let me answer those who think I am crazy. BTC literally tripled
overnight a few weeks ago when there was "speculation" about futures
contracts. Price swings in the crypto world happen over the least sensible
things. My assumption was that the news from Coinbase was actually helping
prop up BCH all this time, and that may have been true. I guess I took for
granted that it was a sure thing.

~~~
huangc10
> assuming no additional risks emerge

The letter was simply a possible notion. No guarantee. Why not send out
another letter saying they were going to release it on this day?

I know why, because they wanted to manipulate the market.

~~~
twodave
I thought it was pretty obvious if they committed to giving people their BCH
balance they'd have to at least halfway support it. Plus, they never reported
any setbacks. The people I talk crypto with and myself are already busy trying
to guess what will make it on Coinbase/GDAX after BCH. If this development is
any indicator, we're wasting our time since we can just wait until they
announce and buy in the period between announcement and launch (assuming they
announce the next one before launching it).

~~~
jmknoll
I’m not sure that they’ll announce the next one. I think BCH was a bit of an
anomaly i this regard. At the time of the fork, Coinbase announced that they
wouldn’t support BCH, and then in response to the outcry, changed course and
said that they would.

I’m not so sure they’ll do the same with upcoming additions. I do definitely
see the merit of trying to guess their next move though, as there seems to be
a lot of money in Coinbase just chasing whatever comes up in hopes that it
will also go to 20,000/coin

~~~
xchaotic
There is an interview with the new CEO saying that they have a formal review
process for adding new 'currencies' and BCH is simply first in line. Having
many cryptos adds legitimacy, whether there is one underneath or not.. THey
can say oh BTC, BCH, LTC all crashed, but ETH only crashed by 150% so
cryptocurrencies are still viable (even when they are not)

------
colinbartlett
So if I sell my newfound BCH today, which was birthed from thin air a few
months ago, but originates from BTC I bought years ago, is it short term
capital gains or long term?

~~~
ohhhlol
[https://bitcoin.tax/blog/how-to-tax-bitcoin-cash-
bch/](https://bitcoin.tax/blog/how-to-tax-bitcoin-cash-bch/)

What if you had no interest in BCH but you owned 1,000 BTC. Do you suddenly
have a $277,000 income tax bill?

Yes, as discussed by Tyson Cross, tax attorney at BitcoinTaxSolutions.com.
Since you have accession to wealth then this is taxable income.

~~~
josephagoss
Here is a counter point I would argue. Anyone can make a Bitcoin fork, in fact
Bitcoin forks are being made every week now. Is every Bitcoin holder now
liable for that?

Also these forks often collapse, so when was the income gain? The same day?
You'd have people owing more tax than their entire net worth. (Forks often
pump in the first day/week then drop to nothing.)

If this is possible then you could attack every Bitcoin holder by making
millions of forks each day and making lots of trades to give each fork real
value. If you don't declare each fork you end up getting penalties.

I would imagine a more sane way to deal with this is like how the ATO deals
with Bitcoin mining. You mine Bitcoin but it's not realized until transferred
to a third party.

I would argue the same for forks.

A fork is made, you have coins. But it's not like you received those coins.
Technically you always had them as they are old coins just now on a different
chain. If you sell the coins then it's a gain that you owe tax on.

But forcing each user to track every fork as income is impractical and not
viable. You'll see more of this as thousands of forks come into existence over
the coming years.

This is something I would actually look into getting a private ruling about.

~~~
schrodinger
Wouldn’t it not count as income until you sold it for USD? In which case you
wouldn’t be liable for every fork, just the ones you benefitted from.

~~~
bencollier49
That's the way it's treated in UK law, but apparently in the US, you're liable
for the tax as soon as you have access to the asset. I think the same thing
causes people problems with stock options. Seems like an odd bit of
legislation.

~~~
schrodinger
Hmm, are you sure? I thought that if you held bitcoin for over a year, it
would be taxed as capital gains? Meaning you don't realize the value until you
sell it?

~~~
IanCal
I think the key difference is that the initial value is not gains, it's much
more like income.

------
electic
It is interesting to see all the people up in arms here. Everyone here is
assuming that no one knew that Coinbase was going to add Bitcoin Cash. That
simply isn't true.

For the last two months, they have said they plan to add it. In fact, Bitcoin
Cash was about 280 dollars and it was common knowledge Coinbase was going to
support it. You, the employees, and everyone else could have loaded up if you
wanted to.

Lastly, there is no real incentive for employees to load up on BCH to make a
quick buck. In the first seconds of trading a massive sell wall of 12,000
orders emerged and that would drive the price down dramatically.

~~~
jondwillis
I was watching the sell wall, and it built up to 12,000 slowly over the period
of at least 45 minutes, probably because the ticker price said $8499 on
Coinbase.

Where this all starts to smell a little funny is how badly and strangely this
was rolled out, how they allowed some trades, and how the price crept up
50-100% before the announcement. Someone said they accidentally released some
bitcoin cash UI feature that tipped people off a few days ago. More
incompetence.

~~~
mtrycz
They did release an API for BCH, which makes sense to release early, for
merchants.

I don't know of UI slips, but that'd be incompetente, yes.

------
djezer
I sent out my bictoin cash to a wallet and the transaction url gives me a 404.
Coinbase posted this message on their page : "Partially Degraded Service:
Outgoing Bitcoin Cash transactions are currently not being sent. Our team is
investigating."

------
Improvotter
Coinbase announces support for a cryptocurrency and the price skyrockets. I
can't believe people just start to buy a cryptocurrency because they suddenly
can more easily.

~~~
jpatokal
It's also a vote of confidence. Many people, including me, assumed that
Bitcoin Cash would rapidly become worthless and sold it off immediately.
Having the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world support it means it may
actually hang around for a while.

~~~
tobiaswk
If I may ask... Why did you have this assumption? I'm asking you specifically
because like you said many sold their Bitcoin Cash.

I suspect those who didn't were mostly the ones with deeper insight of the
underlying technology. When the fork occurred full blocks had already been a
problem for well over a year. Segwit was not the solution and overcomplicated
the blockchain. This is not debatable anymore. Bitcoin Cash abolished this
"overengineering" and simply increased the block size. Disabled RBF making
0-confirmations a thing again. And lastly just recently fixed the DAA. Many
think that Bitcoin Cash is closer to the original whitepaper by Satoshi. I'd
argue that is true.

Currently the Bitcoin has had 100k+ unconfirmed transactions for weeks... and
a ever growing mempool. You cannot transact or move your coins confidently
without paying large fees. 500 satoshis/byte or about 30 dollars. The original
vision is completely destroyed. Sentences like "store of value" are now the
term used to describe Bitcoin. Very far from what the Bitcoin used to be.
[https://bitcoin.org/en/](https://bitcoin.org/en/) is little more but a lie
now.

~~~
amackera
Increasing the block size doesn't seem to me like a long-term solution for
Bitcoin's scalability problem. From the tone of your post though, it seems
like you're mind is unlikely to be changed about Bitcoin Cash.

~~~
JonnyNova
Can you elaborate on why you think that increasing the block size doesn't seem
like a solution for scaling?

~~~
nmj
For the same reason we do not make bigger cars when we want to go to space.

~~~
JonnyNova
That is not a good comparison to the situation. Cars and outer space have
nothing to do with each other at all. Whereas the number of transactions is
directly impacted by the available size on the block that they consume.

------
wickedlogic
I suspect they have some fixing to do yet... common prices listed on indexes
are ~$3,539.82 USD at the moment. Coinbase UI has the UI pegged at $8,499.03
.. with console errors, and ssl to be distrusted errors.

~~~
cvoss
The UI's prices were/are accurate as far as I can tell. I think the trading
was just that unstable. When it opened at 17:20 PST, the price was indeed
~$3.5k, then shot up and down violently until they pulled the plug three
minutes later at ~$9.5k.

~~~
kbody
They screwed it up badly. If you checked BTC/BCH, there were open orders
buying 1 BCH for 3 BTC, which is totally ridiculous. Obviously there was some
effort on pumping it a lot.

Coinbase basically did one of the most basic mistakes for new markets (or any
newly-online market), to not allow orderbooks to be filled before trades can
take place. And so people took advantage of it. I just hope inexperienced
people didn't get caught in the middle of it.

~~~
Atheros
That's ludicrous. Do people not know what a limit order is? Do I walk into a
car dealership and say, "Please sell me a car now. Here are all my personal
and banking details. There is no price limit." What do you think is going to
happen? How is this idiocy the exchange's fault?

------
massaman_yams
Based on data from the gdax trades api, in the approx. 2 minutes and 40
seconds this was live on gdax yesterday, about $15.5 million USD of trades
occurred, at a volume weighted average price of $5,080.

~~~
xchaotic
is it possible to sign up for GDAX instead of coinbase if you don't have a US
based company? I'd much prefer programmatic access and coinbase hardly ever
works at times like these...

~~~
massaman_yams
I think if you can sign up for a coinbase account, you automatically get gdax
access as well - I don't think there's any additional requirements for gdax.

------
ireallydontcare
I've had the worst customer support experience with coinbase. I'd advise not
using their service. They aren't equipped to support their customers. I'm out
of pocket $1000 and have been in a "queue" for the last couple of months.

~~~
cbstory
Same

Unfortunately if you want timely support from cb you have to behave kind of
unsavory.

Look up their higher level staff on LinkedIn, then email them. You can also do
some creative Google searches to find their personal email and contact them
there.

Contact them and they will transfer you to priority people who can actually do
stuff.

~~~
rogual
You can also submit a complaint to the CFPB. I did this and got my money back
within a week.

~~~
eggie
I have done this. I will suggest the same process to others who have been
locked out despite providing positive identification.

------
throwaway12351
Does anyone else find it highly suspicious that Coinbase goes down whenever
there is any major movement in prices?

You can explain this as just the natural result of too much traffic, but
that's not convincing. This is a business valued at over 1 billion dollars
that has been operating for years. If this is still a problem, it's either
unbelievable incompetence, or because they see no reason to fix it.

And here is a worst-case theory, by way of speculation not accusation. Being
down whenever there is a lot of movement lets them beat all of their
customers. When there is a crash, they can sell before their customers can.
When there is a boom, they can buy before before their customers can. And
because such a big portion of the market trades through them, this is more
than trivial gains.

I have no way of knowing if this is what's happening, but it seems to be
worthy of discussion, given how many people are placing trust in them. They
don't really have an adequate explanation for the constant downtime, and I
think they owe one to their customers.

~~~
kough
They aren't frontrunning their customers. Their whole brand is being the one
trustworthy option in a world of scammers; they already make a fuckload of
money off of transaction fees, no reason to throw out that trust and ruin
their cash cow. It's just a scaling problem, turns out it's hard to make Ruby
on Rails handle their needs.

~~~
throwaway12351
They could be doing it to make up shortfalls in their own BTC holdings
relative holdings promised to customers, either in actual quantity, or in
price actually acquired vs. price paid by the customer.

------
petercooper
_All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork
will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase
account._

Pardon the naive question, but does this mean Coinbase users who held Bitcoin
have essentially "doubled their money"?

~~~
derefr
An "equal balance of Bitcoin Cash", as in 1000BTC becomes joined by 1000BCH.
BCH is right now worth about 1/10th the value of BTC, so people have 110%ed
their money.

Also, people who just had money sitting around in a private wallet on the
blockchain—that is, outside of any exchange—have _also_ 110%ed their money;
there's nothing special about Coinbase, it happened for any and all BTCs that
existed on 2017-08-01.

(What _is_ special is the accounts at the _other_ exchanges, who have thusfar
mostly _not_ provided their users with access to their equivalent BCH gains.
It can be argued that the gains were made to the exchange's float, rather than
to the users' accounts, so the BCH isn't "inherently" owned by the depositors,
any more than capital gains of leveraged investments using a bank's
liabilities are owed to the depositors of said bank. Really, since this "debt"
has no (legal or smart-) contractual existence, it's up to social norms
whether individual exchanges capitulate and hand over the BCH gains they've
accrued.)

------
imsofuture
Maybe focus on fixing the broken bits of your site, like ID verification.

~~~
fanzhang
Coinbase customers probably prioritize receiving an extra 10%+ value on their
accounts above those features.

~~~
c0nducktr
It's all good until you actually have a problem, and then you're just stuck
emailing someone who never replies.

~~~
fanzhang
Agreed it would suck to hold a bank account (Paypal, Coinbase) and then get
deprioritized because your account isn't important enough.

It would be interesting to see what fraction of accounts have a "serious
contention" with them on the order of not being able to move substantial
funds. If any institution showed a figure even has high as 5% I would be
seriously dissuaded.

------
seanwilson
For other exchanges that support large numbers of other coins, how are they
able to do this and Coinbase cannot? I'm assuming there's some development and
risk involved but what work is involved in adding a new coin?

~~~
massaman_yams
Exchanges that offer trading on hundreds of currency pairs have to deal with
UI clutter and consumer confusion. For Coinbase, that's a much bigger deal
than the arguably small technical cost to add the currency.

------
Sharma
Now getting error message: Bitcoin cash purchases temporarily disabled.

------
godelski
I wonder if they're accepting the fork because transaction issues that core
has. I mean, neither can handle the transaction load right now. I wonder how
long till another fork.

------
H99189
Would anyone know why a small purchase from Coinbase would still be pending
two full weeks or more after funds had left my checking account? Their support
isn't too helpful. I've made other successful buys and sells, but one
transaction is just stuck pending it seems and they're not being very helpful.

~~~
adjkant
This happened to me twice on GDAX, had them clear it out for me within 24
hours via support. No explanation given.

------
JepZ
Best chance to buy Bitcoins in weeks ;-)

------
kc10
I wonder what will be the next asset they will launch on coinbase. I sure can
buy up now and wait :-)

------
QML
All this cryptocurrency talk has inspired me to understand the innerworkings
of exchanges -- so how does a company like Coinbase scale to meet the demands
of new customers? Surely they're not the first company to deal with this
problem.

~~~
johnmarcus
I don't think the problem is scale, the problem is there are multi-exchanges
for the same asset. You can't trade GOOG, or TSLA on both NYSE and the NASDAQ
for precisely this reason - a run up on one exchange will cause the entirety
of money to shift for arbitrage. This is the real problem they are facing,
imho.

~~~
masterjack
Actually, these stocks are traded on both NYSE and NASDAQ (and 10 other
exchanges, including IEX), but Reg NMS promises the customer to get the best
price on any exchange

------
fernandopj
Up 50% from past 24hs. Previous ATH was ~2500, now at USD 3100 at Coinbase. I
was wondering what triggered it. This morning was already at a high price
~2100. It was somewhat stable around ~1700 just two days ago.

~~~
lkbm
I'm pretty sure simply being available on Coinbase/gdax triggered it. There
are tons casuals like me who just use that.

~~~
CyrusL
The commenter you're replying to is saying that he "was wondering." My reading
of his comment is that earlier today he was wondering why Bitcoin Cash was up
so much (prior to the Coinbase announcement).

Now the price action makes sense. There were insiders who knew today was the
day that Bitcoin Cash was coming to Coinbase and the price was up on that
info. It's really a comment on the nature of unregulated crypto markets and
insider trading.

~~~
hisabness
there were other BCH related announcements like Bitpay this week...

------
beebmam
Insider crypto trading is a giant issue and it's extremely fucked up.

~~~
mrb
FYI: « _Coinbase maintains a strict trading policy and internal guidelines for
employees. Coinbase employees have been prohibited from trading in Bitcoin
Cash for several weeks._ »
[https://mobile.twitter.com/coinbase/status/94329039141917491...](https://mobile.twitter.com/coinbase/status/943290391419174912)

~~~
elliotec
Or what? They get caught (highly unlikely) and if so, fired (very wealthy now,
and quite employable)? Hard to see a downside to breaking that "strict" rule.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
They get to graduate to running a hedge fund or an ICO for being a former
Coinbase employee :)

------
rootsudo
Yesterday it was hell as I was caught on the other side of a trade.

I've been successfully day trading making $300/400 a day, and it's great. But
I missed out.

Missed out.

And had to hold overnight.

------
jypepin
they say trading BCH in EURO is available immediately but on GDAX it says it's
not available yet... Anyone knows when we can expect this to be available?

------
matt-attack
Anyone know what happens if I return coins I had pulled out before the fiasco
this summer? Will my acct reflect a balance from both coins?

~~~
wmf
No. Use your wallet to split out your BCH.

------
Falkens_Maze
Edit: I was able to login after several minutes of downtime.

I would urge others to buy a hardware wallet and not store your coins with
Coinbase.

------
fpisfun
Haha just not yet, been trying all day to buy it

------
hendzen
I wonder how much money Coinbase employees, friends and family made by insider
trading on this announcement. Gotta love unregulated markets!

~~~
huangc10
Exactly the first thought that came to my mind.

BCH up 30%. I wonder how many Coinbase employees bought BCH throughout this
past month.

Also. it's easily predictable that introducing a new currency will temporarily
affect the other currencies negatively.

Very gray area.

~~~
flashmob
Thought experiment: Just say Citibank adds the Mexican pesos to their
products, USA & international, side by side to all their USD products. If
citibank bought pesos before the announcement, would they be engaging in
insider trading? (Pesos are just for illustrative purposes, replace with your
local currency)

If so, would every bank need to halt trading in a currency before adding it?

~~~
hendzen
Pesos are already widely available to retail investors so it isn't really
comparable to the situation with BCH. The average US crypto investor is only
buying what is available on Coinbase (note that its one of the top apps in the
iOS app store...), not jumping through the hoops needed to use Bitfinex, etc.

Here's a more appropriate analogy. A penny stock with the symbol BCH is
lightly traded over the counter by institutional investors via pink sheets.
The New York Stock Exchange decides to list the stock for trading, making it
easily available to everyone with a TD-Ameritrade/Robinhood/ETrade account but
does so with no pre-announcement. Should NYSE prevent their employees from
buying the pink sheet over the counter prior to the announcement?

------
juice_bus
Seems so perfectly timed for the latest drop and issues with bitcoin its self

------
stevebmark
Why was this banned from the front page?

------
cohnnton
it's hilarious how many suckers will get drawn to this scam over and over.....

1.) omg this cryptocurrency is so transactional/rare

2.) nope. this isn't transactional at all! it costs me $350 to send $350!

3.) nope. it's not rare, coinbase just added ANOTHER transactional/rare
crytocurrency!

4.) time to lose 80% on another cryotocurrency!

~~~
hyprCoin
You and I seem to have had very different differences in crypto currency.

1) Rarity does play a factor in some currencies. Others less so. You get to
choose what is important to you.

2) Transaction fees for BTC are hovering at $30 last I checked. Still huge but
other coins have low to no fees.

3) There is only one vitalik. Some resources are scarce.

4) The only way you could have lost money in the last year was by day trading.
Don't do that unless you are ok with extreme risk/reward scenarios. You can
easily lose 80% with a few bad trades.

