By
Steve Muchoki
April 25th, 2024
Coinbase is yet to allow its users withdraw their BCH SV since November’s hard fork. Since the highly publicized Bitcoin Cash hard fork, it has been reported that the exchange has not permitted its Bitcoin Cash holders to make Bitcoin SV withdrawals.
The split happened in the middle of November last year, as Bitcoin Cash morphed into two tickers at war. Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision), and BCH ABC are the two tickers and product of the hard fork led by conservatives such as Roger Ver and the famous Craig Wright who had earlier claimed he was the mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
The exchange resumed trading of Bitcoin ABC after the fork and also decided to give BCH ticker for Bitcoin ABC as it had longer proof of work chain and a higher hashrate.
Coinbase then said:
“We will continue to evaluate the safety of the BCH SV chain. Our current intention is to support withdrawal services for the BCH SV chain so that our customers may withdraw funds at a future date. We anticipate this development work will take at least a few weeks but may take longer.”
However, in an email sent around Christmas they wrote:
“Following the BCH hard fork and conclusion of the hash war, Bitcoin SV has confirmed the creation of a new coin, BSV. Coinbase intends to allow customers to withdraw BSV at a future date, though we do not currently intend to support trading, buys or sells.”
While Bitcoin SV withdrawals are on hold, Coinbase has been adding more “sh*tcoins” to their list of cryptocurrencies.
One user wrote:
“You have been busy adding new trading pairs but cannot ensure that coins that your clients own can be given to them for them to use. That is unacceptable. Please escalate this to someone whom can provide a better answer.”
According to the firm, development work for Bitcoin SV withdrawals is underway, although it could still be several weeks from coming on-stream. And as for on-boarding full support for Bitcoin SV transactions—they’ve still yet to declare their hand.
If Coinbase wants to continue to serve its customers in 2019, this is a situation that needs to be resolved quickly. Bitcoin SV is the only protocol capable of handling mass scale payments, as demonstrated by stress tests which comfortably handled 1.6 million transactions in four hours.
A number of Coinbase users are now crying out for the release of their BCH SV, with a subreddit specifically dedicated to the building issue. The frustrated user who reached out to the cryptocurrency news outlet shared his conversations, as he complains of Coinbase’s penchant for repeating the same set of excuses.
One user wrote before Christmas:
“I already read that generic update before I wrote you. Your team hasn’t updated us for 5 weeks since then. It is about time for a further update. Please provide something better than just rehashing what you already have on your website. We deserve better.”
The block size at 128 MB is already expected to increase to 512 MB in Q2 2019, ultimately scaling to 2 GB by November, with capability for handling transactions numbering in the billions. Just this week, on the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin genesis block, a world record 103 MB block was mined on BSV chain—an achievement that confirms Bitcoin SV is on the correct path to becoming the world’s enterprise blockchain.
Poloniex Had its Own Pre-Fork Solution
Poloniex led the way and allowed both pre-fork trading and a convenient way for users to be sure their coins would “split” properly. All one had to do was make a deposit to their Bitcoin Cash wallet prior to the fork. Poloniex would take care of the rest. Many used this as an opportunity to initially “dump” their Bitcoin SV, even before it was officially live on its own blockchain.
It seems that Bitcoin ABC has won the war as most exchanges now regard Bitcoin ABC as Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin ABC has also replaced the original Bitcoin cash to become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap while Bitcoin SV is ranking number nine.