At the time of writing, the Bitcoin Cash fork is planned to come in roughly 3 hours, you can check the countdown timer on timeanddate. This means that those that have their funds on a compatible wallet will receive Bitcoin Cash at a 1:1 rate according to their Bitcoins. If you haven’t yet, make sure to move your coins off of exchanges that will not support BCH in order to receive the tokens.
While this $200 drop is anticipated, it still comes as a surprise as only 4 hours earlier the market didn’t show any signs of bearish movement. However, the price dipped over 10% in a matter of minutes as a few major sell orders executed on exchanges. It only makes sense that the price would dip roughly $200-300 because that is the current value of the BCH futures.
On the flip side, Bitcoin Cash has been trading at a steady $200 but recently peaked at over $400 as traders couldn’t stop buying up the asset. Currently, ViaBTC is taking the lead with the futures BCH marked as it has 10x the trading volume compared to Kraken which only implemented BCH hours ago, and HitBTC whose BCH market is questionable as it is trading at over $700.
As we covered earlier, Bitcoin Cash has never been “free money”, such a thing doesn’t exist. The same exact thing happened with the ETH / ETC fork, as soon as the chain split happened the original cryptocurrency’s value dropped. However, when you combined both ETH’s and ETC’s value, it came out to roughly the same pre-fork price.
Another reason why Bitcoin’s price may be dropping is because of Coinbase’s decision not to support or credit the token. Not only did Coinbase refuse to support BCH, but they also delayed withdrawals for those wanting to get their Bitcoins off of the exchange. Tim Wu, professor at Columbia University and contributing writer to NY Times said in a tweet that the company may be liable for users’ losses if it doesn’t credit users with the new token.
In my opinion, @coinbase is courting serious, maybe ruinous legal trouble if it doesn't give its users the full value of the Bitcoin fork
— Tim Wu (@superwuster) July 30, 2017
Many users have been disgruntled with how Coinbase has been handling this situation, because withdrawal delays started around July 29th which was still days away from the hard fork. Some argue that Coinbase didn’t give enough of a warning or opportunity to withdraw those funds and users are now going to essentially loose over $300 per Bitcoin that they own.
These are exciting times for Bitcoin. To see the fork go live check out blockchain.info. When you see a block that is larger than 1000kb that is the sign that the new fork has activated and the chain split has taken effect. Furthermore, if you take a look at the detailed blocks list on Blockchain, you will see that the new blocks will no longer be marked as appearing on the “main chain”, but will be marked as appearing on an alternate BCH chain.
