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Jan 22, 2018
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In the morning of January 18, GDAX has started trading Bitcoin Cash at around 9 AM PST. The price of BCH responded to the increased demand, increasing its price with around 15-20%. The lowest Bitcoin Cash was trading in January 17th, was 1360$. After the recovery of the market BCH stayed stable with a price tag of 1500$, but 12 hours later it had risen to over 1800$.
There was a status update on GDAX’s page saying that all initial testing had concluded and all functionality was restored, but users were still angry, because they are waiting for the implementation of SegWit. BCH was included on GDAX, following the addition of the hard fork on Coinbase that happened at the end of last year. When that happened Bitcoin Cash’s price skyrocketed to a new all-time high, gaining over 100% and topped the charts with an over 4000$ price.
A lot of people were outraged back then and accused Coinbase of insider trading. They accused them, because the price of BCH skyrocketed even before the announcement and the implementation. It’s like a lot of Bitcoin investors knew what was happening before it happened and when BCH started trading in Coinbase, it already had grown with 100%. The trading started at around 3500$. The same time Bitcoin Cash was rising, Bitcoin lost over 2000$ of its price. Since the incident Coinbase said that they will not add any more coins in the future.
Wrong focus
Coinbase owns GDAX, but they are separate entities. However the community was not happy with the news. GDAX have promised to implement the SegWit protocol at the end of last year. This protocol is a soft fork on the transactions format of Bitcoin and has already been implemented on currencies such as Litecoin, Vertcoin and others. Its purpose is to solve malleability and to increase transaction speed by helping with blockchain size limitation problem. It manages to do this by splitting the transaction into two segments. SegWit would allow for cheaper and faster transactions in Bitcoin’s blockchain. GDAX is not the only service to be slow in adding the protocol. Others include Blockchain and Gemini. An engineer at BitGo, Jameson Lopp, tweeted:
It's not a new revelation that a significant cause of bitcoin network congestion is from popular services such as @blockchain, @coinbase, and @gemini who are using block space inefficiently. If you don't want to contribute to the problem, don't use them. https://t.co/f1AO2ePRMw
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) January 12, 2018
Bitcoin and its users are suffering from slow transaction time ranging up to few days and really high transaction costs. The SegWit protocol is well needed and users have the right to be angry. Exchanges should focus on what is most important. Maybe if it was their first offence, people could have been more patient.
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