Quote from: ulhaq on February 08, 2018, 12:38:16 AM

Some exchanges have not, and have no plans, to give access to coins from bitcoin forks. Many of them are already worth a substantial amount of money, and likely will increase in value. Is there a legal basis for suing exchanges to get access to such coins?

Since the exchanges are acting as custodial agents, they are holding bitcoin on behalf of the user, just like a brokerage does not "own" the stock but holds it on behalf of the customer. Whether or not the exchange plans on spending that bitcoin, if they do not give it to the customer they are stealing from the customer. Since coins from bitcoin forks are associated with the private keys held by the exchange, the exchange cannot argue that they did not "claim" them by taking no action, because they do own them, whether they wanted to or not.

I could imagine people pooling together to sue exchanges if this argument is viable.

This sounds like something that could retro-actively bite a lot of exchanges in the ass if they did not have a written policy in effect at the time of forking. It is a great question and at the onset of the BTC forking it is one of the things that I didn't like about my exchange.

In all due fairness, they should retroactively reimburse forked coins if they did not have a policy whereby the user agreed to forego forked coins.

Why? Because it is the right thing to do. Whilst they were holding your coins they were making money off of them. I promise you your held coins were being micro-traded by their exchange against other markets. Additionally, they can most certainly AFFORD to do so even if they do not wish to offer trading the coin that was forked resulting in new coins for you.

However, in the initial onset of this enterprise, it is unlikely we will ever see those coins without an organised and very LARGE movement against the exchanges for the forked coins. Ultimately what will drive their decision will be end-user pressure to do so.

You do need to keep customers happy and keep them loyal. Especially with DECENTRALISED exchanges stepping up with lower or not trading fees and better security etc.

This is a thread I will gladly follow and hope maybe we get a resolution to it. In 5 years all the people who DID NOT get their coins maybe very wealthy if we can organize a large enough body to go after each exchange for this. In the end it pays for the exchanges to not be greedy I think.

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