Coinbase announced that GDAX, its flagship digital asset exchange, will not support any blockchain created by Bitmain's planned hard fork. Adam White, general manager of GDAX, made the statement. Coi
Coinbase announced that GDAX, its flagship digital asset exchange, will not support any blockchain created by Bitmain's planned hard fork. Adam White, general manager of GDAX, made the statement.
Coinbase manages 28.9 million wallets and counts 8.7 million active users. White told customers seeking coins from the fork to withdraw their Bitcoin by July 31. In a blog post, he stated: "Customers that desire access to UAHF coins should withdraw their bitcoin from GDAX by July 31. We support the growth and scaling of the Bitcoin network. Although we have no plans to support additional blockchains at this time, we will continue to monitor UAHF developments."
The fork in question is the UAHF, a user-activated hard fork. Bitmain created the plan as a backup if the Digital Currency Group-led Segwit2x fails to gain approval. Bitmain manufactures mining equipment and operates Antpool, the largest mining pool by hashrate. The company revealed the plan in June.
Bitmain designed the UAHF as a safeguard against the UASF, also known as BIP148. The company explained to MiningPool: "The UAHF is a contingency plan to protect the Bitcoin ecosystem from the threats posed by the BIP148 fork aka UASF. This also means that it will be activated later than, and not at the same time as, the UASF fork. Reinforcing its role as a contingency plan to protect the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitmain will dedicate some of its own hash rate to mining the UAHF chain for at least 72 hours and release it to the public only if the threat of the UASF chain to the Bitcoin ecosystem appears imminent."
This week, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 91 reached the 80 percent activation threshold. BIP 91 represents a compromise between the original Segregated Witness and the Segwit2x proposal. Major mining pools provided the hashrate support to reach that point.
Throughout the industry, exchanges and wallet providers have said they would treat a Bitmain fork as a separate cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin. Coinbase's position matches this sentiment.
The central question involves what makes a hard fork safe. Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, examined this in his paper "Hard Forks, Soft Forks, Defaults and Coercion." Buterin argued that hard forks upgrade blockchain networks with greater efficiency than soft forks. He wrote: "Proponents of hard forks are often derided as trying to effect a 'hostile takeover' of a network, and 'force' users to go along with them. Additionally, the risk of chain splits is often used to bill hard forks as 'unsafe.' It is my personal viewpoint that these criticisms are wrong, and furthermore in many cases completely backwards. This viewpoint is not specific to Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or any other blockchain; it arises out of general properties of these systems, and is applicable to any of them."
Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash, expressed a matching view. He argued that a hard fork without a persistent chain split remains safe if it doesn't fracture the community. The UAHF, designed to create two separate blockchains, fails that test.
Ethereum, Monero, and Zcash all execute hard forks as part of their standard operations. In 2016, Ethereum completed four hard forks. Some addressed security flaws; the others restored funds from the hacked decentralized autonomous organization.
