It's good to see them take this step but they should let their customers have their BCH as soon as possible.   It's not much different than your stockbroker withholding a dividend or split stock from you.   

A broker holding your stocks for you "in street name" seems very similar to a blockchain exchange holding the private keys to customer deposited coins.

If you could make magical machines that would just give you money, would you ever sell them?   If so , why?

Does that mean we will move BTC threads to altcoins when another coin overtakes it's marketcap?   The Current BTC is not the original either...

I don't care what notices they put on the site.   If you look at the actual economic effect of what they did, it looks like pretty brazen theft.   A jury would likely see it that way too.   I bet a lawyer could draw similarities to securities law where an account holder has a right to dividends and splits.    What if E-Trade said "we will not support Google C shares, so you should withdraw certificates before the split.?

The key thing here is "not supporting" does not mean that Coinbase did not receive the BCH coins themselves, they just decided not to allocate them to their customers.

I removed all my coins to my personal core wallet before the fork so this is not sour grapes talking.   I'm just astonished at how they think they will get away with this without any consequences.

The market will determine what the "real" fork is.   Right now it is far from certain which will win. 

Since Bitcoin Cash is a large block hard fork, does this mean that Bitcoin Classic (current protocol with no changes as discussed in this thread) will be a third chain actively supported on August 1?

I have not had any deposit or withdraw issues with Polo except for one time when a nem withdraw was put on hold for a few hours when I was still level 1 and without 2-factor auth.    After adding 2 factor I never had any withdraws held for approval.   Shortly after they disabled the trollbox  I was upgraded from level1 straight to level3 (25k).   The documentation for level2/3 had been uploaded and sitting there with no action for over a month before that.

This lends credibility to their claim that disabling the trollbox was to allocate more resources to customer support.

Even though they have been slowly gaining my trust I still withdraw any coins that I don't expect to trade within 24 hours.

These exchanges are only going to credit users coins on one chain if there is a split right?   So the exchange would get to keep any "duplicate" (etc-like) coins for themselves.  There were likely many users planning to withdraw before Aug 1 for this very reason and now they cant.   They should have announced the cutoff date well in advance. 

There doesn't have to be a "good" reason as it's just the marginal buyer and seller that sets the latest trade price.   It's not surprising that the price is rising as resolution of the scaling issue in the most favorable (for stability) possible outcome has restored confidence among traders and investors.   You could consider price action the past few weeks/months as being suppressed by the cloud over the scaling debate and that restriction is now lifted.  As for the magnitude of the swings, blockchain assets are one of the most freely and organically traded things these days.  Stocks were once like this before central banks started obsessing over them.

What is the best way to prepare for two chains?   If I transfer BTC to a core desktop wallet before 8/1, How do I make sure I can spend them on both chains?   Will there be a different wallet program compatible with the core wallet.dat?

DigiByte has a 15 second block time target.   I've transferred it to/from desktop core wallet and Poloniex and it really is amazingly fast.

It looks like ETH/USD trading on GDAX was halted since 16:09 EDT.    I do see recent trades on ETH/BTC and ETH/EUR.  Other BTC and LTC pairs seem to be trading normally.

Edit: trying to trade LTC/USD and gdax interface is very very slow, taking forever to place/cancel orders.

Buy LTC on a fiat based exchange like GDAX, transfer that to Poloniex, use that to buy BTC, then XEM.   Transferring BTC between exchanges is expensive and unreliable.    All exchanges take LTC and it's transferrs are cheap and fast.

BTC and ETH market caps are converging fast with ETH the definite winner from the chaos earlier yesterday. 


BTC: $43,635,672,080    
ETH: $36,798,175,278
Diff:     $6,837,496,802

With the current circulating supply they should cross at ETH/BTC ~0.1773.
 
This will be the first time a crypto currency has lost the #1 spot but it certainly won't be the last.  It will be interesting to see if there are significant dislocations in prices or if it's a non-event.   Will there be a constantly evolving ecosystem of coins that will backstop some eventual stable average (like S&P500 is for stocks) or will one coin periodically replace another as #1 every 10 years or so?

You were so close to the right answer but it is not blockchain that is causing inflation of fiat, it is central banks that continuously expand the fiat supply.   Blockchain just happens to be the single best sink for this inflation (see Gresham's Law) but the world is just barely starting to realize this.   As this trend continues enormous fortunes will be made (and lost) as wealth is transferred to various blockchain products (and between existing and new products).