Suing Exchanges for Forks

[Harlot]

I remembered during the Bitcoin Fork for Bitcoin Cash a lot of exchanges as well as gambling sites noted that they won't be issuing the fork coins to be credited in your account as if you want to receive the fork coins you need to withdraw it in your wallet which will give you the fork coins. Now if they didn't give you any notice or warning there is still no clear win for you as exchanges really don't act as wallet and it is not part of their main service, they can even use my reasoning in an argument in court.

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[palle11]

The exchanges agreed to hold custody of your BTC and your BTC only. Any forks that may occur are a different matter

I don't think this argument should hold much to water your position, although you made and had a soft landing of your post in the end. Thus, talking about forking and holding of the coin itself, I think it depends on the exchange because I noticed that certain exchanges especially, coinexchange does release fork coins.

Also, I think that should even be the case naturally,  that exchanges should also have it as a duty to deal with the properties of the coin as if it were the coin directly; that is ,every proceeds of the coin accruing from the coin.

Take for instance, coinomi do have provisions for fork coins or tokens. All you do is to update your wallet and receive it direct to same wallet.  I think it should be nice that exchanges does a thing like that whether it is outrightly a legal obligation or not.

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

This would have obviously been the case but this is not a physical business that would have necessitated converging interested or affected parties. Moreover, it is a decentralized business where people of anonymous identity are involved.

Were it to be like stock, where it is physically situated in a particular territory with a centralized office, then adjudication would have been the order where principals contravened.

[figmentofmyass]

The exchanges agreed to hold custody of your BTC and your BTC only. Any forks that may occur are a different matter

I don't think this argument should hold much to water your position, although you made and had a soft landing of your post in the end. Thus, talking about forking and holding of the coin itself, I think it depends on the exchange because I noticed that certain exchanges especially, coinexchange does release fork coins.

Also, I think that should even be the case naturally,  that exchanges should also have it as a duty to deal with the properties of the coin as if it were the coin directly; that is ,every proceeds of the coin accruing from the coin.

obviously, this depends on jurisdiction. but when it comes to the courts, usually we're looking for what's reasonable. so let's think about that:

i could generate a million forks of BTC right now (that nobody uses, of course). is it reasonable to assume that an exchange is obligated to download all my million forked clients and send me my forked coins?

of course not!

so i think it has to boil down to whether there is actual demand for a fork, and whether the fork is even active at all. either way, i'd be very curious to see arguments heard and court decision issued where the exchange explicitly says in its terms that it won't pay out forked coins.

[timerland]

Exchanges could argue the opposite - when you deposit, their only obligation is to keep whatever amount of whatever crypto safe for you and facilitate withdrawals. There are nothing that states that they have to give you something that isn't even in the initial terms of the deposit.

It seems industry practice anyways for exchanges to not give customers forked coins. The costs of extracting all the small forks is probably too large anyways for just a measly few bucks on average for each customer.

If an exchange doesn't pay up for a major fork, e.g. BCH, that's a different question altogether. In that case, I think that suing them could be a viable option for sure. The legal pressure could potentially mean that exchanges will comply with customer requests to avoid legal trouble, like in the case of Coinbase and BCH.