A little disclaimer: The following is my own view and experience, opinions voiced are mine, and mine only.
Noted.
This fork meant mainly one thing for CG; a huge investment of time and work.
...
All of those tasks were done by CG free of charge...
Totally get that - I'm not suggesting they work for free. A ~10% (+/-) transaction fee would be very reasonable.
I'd also expect from someone who stores funds on a site and is aware of a situation like this fork to take the initiative and inform themselves about how the situation is handled.
Checking the blog or asking a moderator in chat (or maybe even contacting support) takes a few minutes, and avoids running into situations like this.
This is an investment. I don't check it daily or weekly. I check it once a month at most. It's been a year without any problems. Having to spend time checking on it every few days would quickly make any profit earned on it a pretty expensive investment of time.
I don't have exact numbers as I was not involved with the distribution, but as far as I know, over 95% of the investors claimed their BCC/BCH (we're talking about a group of ~500 people).
That's ~$20,000 USD of investor money left on the table. It seems like CG is being compensated quite well with this fork. (
EDIT: See Lutpin's comment below - 95% of investors not BCC)
The first email was sent July 25th, when the blogpost "Update: BIP91 and BCC" was published (I know that because I got the email myself, as I'm also an investor).
It referenced
this post that includes the information that
"Users will have 12 days after the fork to set their BCC addresses and receive their coins. After that, we will stop accepting new BCC addresses and you will lose your claim due to failing to meet the deadline."
Yes, the email included a link at the bottom asking people to read their blog post. However, writing an email specifically saying at the top that all investors will be paid their BCC and then only mentioning an immediate deadline in a link comes across as disingenuous.
A second email was sent a few days after the fork (only to those users that did not claim their BCC until then) reminding everyone of the deadline.
This is the one that ended up in my junk box. Not blaming CG for that, don't know why it happened. Regardless, this was the first actual email with a deadline in it and it only gave people 5 days.
I'm not suggesting CG is malicious or a scam - it's not. It's legitimate, I've dealt with them for a year without an issue before this. However with this policy in place, my warning to investors still stands. If you invest with CG, you are expected to read every email, blog post, social media, etc. within a few days or risk losing funds like I have. The end result is I've been hit with a ~7% penalty for not reading a blog post and not responding to an email within 5 days.