I keep my bitcoin out of exchanges and am a fan of breadwallet cold storage. With all this talk about BTC forking on August 1st and BCC becoming a minority chain, I started digging for how that would affect what I store on Breadwallet. Here is what I learned....
In the case of a fork, breadwallet will ccontinue to connect to the chain that is the most popular amongst miners. You will not see your balance on the less-popular chain, and your bitcoin balance as shown in the breadwallet app will not change.
Breadwallet expects the less-popular chain to quickly lose support and be abandoned, which is why they have not invested a lot of resources into adding the capability to interact with both chains separately. If a fork does happen, however, funds stored in breadwallet will be safe. There is no need to uninstall breadwallet or take other action, however in the case of a fork we do recommend you refrain from sending or requesting funds until the less-popular chain is no longer active, just as a precaution.
What should I do if I want to access my balance on the minority chain?
In order for breadwallet users to be able to send and receive funds on the chain of their choosing, a feature called “replay protection” needs to be designed. The bitcoin community has not yet decided on the technical details required to offer this type of feature, and it’s possible it may never be offered.
If the less-popular chain continues to be supported with no sign of being abandoned, we intend to release a separate breadwallet app that is designed to work only with the less-popular chain so users can access their funds on that chain.
What if I need to send or receive funds while a less-popular chain is still active?
As long as both chains are active, funds sent or received on the more-popular chain as seen in breadwallet may or may not be reflected on the other chain. If the less-popular chain happens to gain a lot of support and become the most popular chain, any transactions that were sent but not reflected on that chain would be undone.
If you are sending or receiving money to/from someone you trust, this may not be a problem because the funds can be resent in the event the transaction is undone. Merchants who accept bitcoin, however, will most likely require any transactions to be accepted on both chains before being considered valid. If you would like to send money to a merchant while the less-popular chain is still active, please contact them beforehand for instructions on how to proceed.
If you would like to be notified in the event a fork does happen and receive information about how to keep your funds safe throughout the process, please click here to join our mailing list.
Correction: The article previously stated a second app would only be released "if replay protection is designed". We intended that to mean if it was possible to interact with the two chains separately, however some readers interpreted it to mean we would only release the second app if developers of the bitcoin protocol specifically modified their software to provide for replay protection. It is our intention to release the second app as soon as we see two distinct chains that both have considerable support, so the above-mentioned caveat has been removed. March 25, 2017 12:00 PST