Bitcoin Cash is an untested Bitcoin fork that is putting undue pressure on Bitcoin exchanges and wallet providers to support the currency
The newly created Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a rushed spinoff of Bitcoin (BTC), a clonecoin of which there have been many in Bitcoin's past. Tweets: @mdudas Tweets: Mike Dudas / @mdudas : The clearest thing I've read on why Bitcoin Cash was a bad idea http://fortune.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Bitcoin Cash went from concept to live asset in days: backers announced the August 1 launch with bigger blocks just before the split, and most major exchanges — Coinbase prominently among them — chose not to support the new chain at all. Within two days the calculus changed: BCH briefly became the third-most-valuable cryptocurrency at roughly $7B, and Coinbase users threatened to sue over their inaccessible holdings.
Fortune's argument lands in that gap: the fork handed exchanges and wallet providers an untested clonecoin whose holders demand access, forcing infrastructure decisions on a timeline set by the forkers rather than by careful review.
First-order effects
- Exchanges and wallet providers that sat out the fork now face immediate customer pressure — Coinbase most visibly, with legal threats from users whose BCH exists on-chain but sits unsupported on the platform.
Second-order effects
- A $7B market cap makes non-support commercially costly, pushing laggard platforms toward retroactive integration and setting the template for how they handle the next fork's balance-sheet snapshot.
Third-order effects
- The pattern hardens into recurring governance by infrastructure: when the community splits again over the ABC-versus-SV hard fork, exchanges' support choices effectively decide which chain keeps liquidity — making them de facto arbiters of contested upgrades.
The trend: Bitcoin's scaling dispute is institutionalizing chain splits as a recurring event, shifting real power over which branches survive to the exchanges and wallets that choose to list them.