A news outlet known as Legal Weekly recently reported that a Chinese investor sued local exchange OKCoin for allegedly denying him the opportunity to obtain Bitcoin Cash (BCH) after the bifurcation last year. This is the first legal action in China that involves the fork of the first cryptoactive.
The investor known as Feng Bing filed his lawsuit against OKCoin last week, accusing the company of blocking the possibility of receiving 38,748 units of BCH that corresponded to him after the bifurcation that was executed in August of 2017.
For purposes of the legal process, Feng Bin states that it tried to sell Bitcoin Cash when the digital currency reached its historic high of around USD 4,000 per unit in December 2017. However, reports show that when the investor tried to withdraw the BCH after the fork, "discovered that there was no tool to extract the BCH that the platform promised".
After a complaint to the customer service of the platform, OKCoin said that Feng Bin could not extract any Bitcoin Cash because the program of the platform to claim the bifurcated encryption has expired. The investor in turn claimed that the encryption exchange had not made an official announcement about the deadline to claim Bitcoin Cash:
"I have been paying attention to the announcements of the OKCoin coin launch. In none of these reports, there is a statement of the deadline for receipt and removal of the program. "
According to the documents, OKCoin has challenged Feng Bin's claim, alleging that there are inconsistencies between its history and the records of the balances of its accounts.
Bitcoin Cash is a well-known example of hard fork. This means that it is a permanent division in a blockchain protocol, in which the nodes that are executed in the previous version will no longer be accepted in the new one.
Bitcoin bifurcated on August 1, 2017, which led to the presence of two completely different digital currencies, and implied that users who had Bitcoin before fork received an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash, that is, those who had 10 BTC, then they had 10 BCH. In this sense, BCH celebrated its "first birthday" at the beginning of last week.
Bitcoin Cash has been questioned by many, especially since it promises to be what Bitcoin "stopped being". Roger Ver, one of the biggest enthusiasts and promoters of the new token, is one of those who affirms that BCH is the new Bitcoin, in fact, the last time he said it was in December of 2017 when the whole market was on the rise.
He also added that BCH "will have the largest capitalization, volume of trade and user base in the future."
All those who had BTC by the time of the fork should or should have the opportunity to withdraw their BCH tokens to enter in any other wallet. If Mr. Feng was not given this opportunity, we could think that his demand is justified. Either way, we will follow the story closely to know what happens from now on.
Source: CoinTelegraph