Prior to the fork of Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC) on Aug 1, Coinbase was strongly against adjusting their backend for the fork, and rejecting BCC. But apparently somethings happened in the two days to take them from strongly being against it to, ‘we’re programming it into Coinbase as fast as we can!’.
Their email that they sent out on Aug 3rd,
Forks enable innovation and improvements to digital currency and we believe that we will see an increasing number of forks in the future. We expect this to be a vibrant and innovative community.
When a digital currency forks, it creates a new digital asset. Adding new digital assets to Coinbase must be approached with caution. Not every asset is immediately safe to add to Coinbase from a technical stability, security, or compliance point of view.
In the case of bitcoin cash, we made clear to our customers that we did not feel we could safely support it on the day it was launched. For customers who wanted immediate access to their bitcoin cash, we advised them to withdraw their bitcoin from the Coinbase platform. However, there are several points we want to make clear for our customers:
- Both bitcoin and bitcoin cash remain safely stored on Coinbase.
- Customers with balances of bitcoin at the time of the fork now have an equal quantity of bitcoin cash stored by Coinbase.
- We operate by the general principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from hard forks or other unexpected events.
Over the last several days, we’ve examined all of the relevant issues and have decided to work on adding support for bitcoin cash for Coinbase customers.
We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time.
I wonder how many people pulled out their bitcoin for them to change their mind, I for one, had pulled out my bitcoin from Coinbase prior to the fork.
