Bitcoin Forks. Exchanges. Whether its Gemini, Coinbase, Bitfinex, or any other exchange where people are holding BTC, every single one of them is either pocketing billions of dollars of money owed to the general public, or simply ignoring it. Literally - ignoring and not bothering to retrieve billions of dollars. Free money. Left unclaimed just for the Lolz. Has anyone actually thought about this? Some background: Forks create a copy of the blockchain.
Anyone holding (for example) 1 Bitcoin is automatically granted 1 of the new forked coin. Sometimes 10. That coin is then trade-able on exchanges for sometimes upwards of $600. In the case of Bitcoin Cash, it can reach $2,000+. This is literally free money for Bitcoin holders. But they must have access to their private key, which exchange users do not. The exchange controls those private keys, and therefore has the ability to access those fork tokens.
In the case of Bitcoin Gold, currently trading at $192, lets just (inaccurately) assume that Coinbase's 13 million users all have an OVERALL average of only 1 Bitcoin in their accounts.
That's $2.4 billion dollars that is just ehhhh --- not being given to users and ehhhh - not being claimed by Coinbase. The amount of coding required to support a fork like Bitcoin Gold is minimal. Its some effort, but its not a big deal at all.
But that's just one fork. There's also Bitcoin Diamond. Assuming the same 1 BTC per user that's $8.3 billion. Super bitcoin: $1.4 billion. And another 5 forks currently trading futures in the hundreds per coin, equaling easily another $10 billion. None of this money will be given to the users. I'm surprised there haven't been lawsuits. But its just as crazy to think that the money probably isn't even being claimed by the exchanges.
You could take the paranoid approach and assume the exchanges are going shopping with it, but the amount of legal trouble that would create would be astronomical if anyone ever found out. So I guess we just have to assume that the average cryptocurrency exchange is not bothering to retrieve between 5 and 20 billion dollars. Just cuz. The numbers are just fucking astronomical.
Thank you,
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