Coinbase Launches BCH & Trades At $9,500? / Charlie Lee Sells All His LTC / Monero On Ledger Wallet

Story - Coinbase adds support for Bitcoin Cash 0:57
https://blog.coinbase.com/buy-sell-send-and-receive-bitcoin-cash-on-coinbase-65f1b2c7214b

In the early hours of this morning in the UK, Coinbase posted this on their blog.

This means 3 things.

https://www.coinbase.com/dashboard

1, if you held Bitcoin in your Coinbase account on the 1st of August 2017, you’ll now have the equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash in your Coinbase wallet.

2, you can now buy Bitcoin Cash with a credit or debit card using the Coinbase Instant Buy feature.

3, Bitcoin Cash will begin trading on the Coinbase GDAX exchange.
The blog post says this will happen as soon as the order books fill up.

Well, the market did open and begin trading and we can see here:
https://www.gdax.com/trade/BCH-USD

However, trading was quickly halted and is still offline at this moment in time. When I say quickly, I mean the market traded for 4 minutes before being locked.

According to the GDAX status page here:
https://status.gdax.com/

Trading will resume at 9am PST today the 20th of December, which is about 6 hours from the time I’m recording this.

Looking at the trade history down the right of GDAX, the last price Bitcoin Cash traded for was $9,500.

The result of this news was that Bitcoin Cash rallied hard on other exchanges, gaining about 50% and hitting a high on Bitfinex of $3,676.

In a broader sense this has more far reaching implications than the price.

Coinbase is the number 1 destination for people who are new to Bitcoin and want to buy some in the easiest way possible.

This news means there is now a new major onramp from the fiat currency world into Bitcoin Cash.

I’m not saying I’m pro-Bitcoin or pro-Bitcoin Cash, what I am is pro choice…

That’s in the philosophical sense rather than the political sense.

I say let the market decide which Bitcoin they want, but in order for people to choose, they have to be able to make the choice.

So that it’s as easy to buy Bitcoin as Bitcoin Cash, we can stand back and see what choices people make.

Story - Charlie Lee Sells All His LiteCoin 4:55
https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/7kzw6q/litecoin_price_tweets_and_conflict_of_interest/

Charlie Lee in this Reddit post from just a few hours ago said he had just sold or donated all of his LiteCoin.

The major reason he has gone this is so that he and everyone else can be absolutely sure that he can guide the development of LiteCoin objectively.

He said whenever he would Tweet about LiteCoins price or LiteCoin news, he would get accused of doing so for personal benefit.

Ultimately he says it’s a conflict of interest for him to hold LiteCoin and tweet about it since he has so much influence, being the creator and all.

He says now he no longer holds any LiteCoin it’s success is not tied to his financial success, and that allows him to make moves that are best for LiteCoin’s development without any fear of bias toward personal gain.

So he’s still going to continue working full time developing LiteCoin, he just won’t own any.

He is going to need a strategy for when people donate LiteCoin to him but he may just forward that on to his favorite charity, or sell the coins immediately, I don’t know.

He doesn’t specify what he would do in that situation.

What do you think to this move by Charlie Lee?
Is it a smart move? A stupid move?

Would it be better if he had a financial incentive?
Is he virtue signalling? Does he even need to?

Do you believe his stated intentions as pure?

Story - Ledger To Support Monero Q1 2018 7:12
https://np.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/7kufym/google_will_quit_chromeapps/drh8qnt/

I’ve been talking about Monero a lot lately and today we got the best news ever from the CTO of Ledger.

This kind of thing is why I primarily recommend the Ledger Nano S as the best all round hardware wallet.

It’s not perfect, for example Ledger have been having trouble with their node recently meaning the Ledger wallet can’t sync with the blockchain but I think that’s just due to the sheer volume of traffic they are getting lately.