tl;dr: Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is marketing itself as Bitcoin (BTC), scamming consumers into thinking they are buying Bitcoin at a lower price. Its backers use at least three sites to perpetuate this scamBitcoin.com, Reddit (r/BTC) and Twitter (@Bitcoin). Scams have no place on Coinbase, perhaps the best-known American digital asset exchange. But by adding Bitcoin Cash alongside its three other assets, Coinbase has helped legitimize BCHs scam, inviting a regulatory crackdown in this industrys early years.
Look, I dislike Bitcoin Cash and I think its fundamentals are shitty -- highly centralized/concentrated mining, bad scalability roadmap, small community, etc. Some people like Roger Ver are marketing it deceptively. But it's just a fork of open source software. It's a live blockchain with active miners, user base and community. In my book, that's not a scam, and it's not incumbent on Coinbase to remove it.
This is all moot, anyway. If anything, Coinbase has made it clear that it's going to
add coins. Expecting them to de-list BCH is only realistic if its volume drops enough to warrant it.
People often say that Bitcoin's future changes are up to the users, not some dogma like "Satoshi's vision." I agree with that. But "Bitcoin users" is a diverse set of actors, and increasingly so over time. What happens when different camps disagree about forks? Each side calls the other a "scam" and demands that exchanges de-list the other? That's not the spirit of FOSS and it's not the spirit of free markets.
Personally I favor Bitcoin over Bitcoin Cash, but Bitcoin Cash does not qualify as a "scam". It is a competitor.
People are going to have to get used to forks happening in this industry. Forks are a fundamental property of open source software and it is going to continue.
Well said.