Jakarta - Setelah sempat naik gila-gilaan, nilai Bitcoin turun drastis lebih dari USD 1.000 atau sekitar Rp 13,5 juta hanya dalam satu jam. Menurut Coinbase, platform jual beli cryptocurrency asal Amerika Serikat, mata uang digital tersebut terjun bebas dari USD 17.929 (Rp 243,3 juta) ke USD 16.912 (Rp 229,5 juta) pada pukul 3.30 dan 4.30 WIB, seperti detikINET kutip dari CNBC , Rabu (20/12/2017). Padahal, nilai tukar Bitcoin sempat hampir mencapai USD 19.800 (Rp 268,7 juta) pada Minggu lalu. Penurunan tersebut terjadi menjelang penutupan pasar saham di Amerika Serikat. Dengan kejadian tersebut, Bitcoin kini memegang 48% dari total kapitalisasi pasar seluruh cryptocurrency, berdasarkan data yang dimiliki oleh CoinMarketCap. Sedangkan Bitcoin cash, 'musuh dalam selimut' dari Bitcoin, justru sempat mengalami peningkatan sebesar 24,5% ke angka USD 2.735,58 (Rp 37 juta) yang menjadi rekor tertingginya, meskipun nilainya turun pada pukul 4:35 WIB menjadi USD 2.625 (Rp 35,6 juta). Untuk kapitalisasi pasar, Bitcoin cash masih tertinggal cukup jauh dari saudara tuanya tersebut, dengan mengkoleksi 7% bagian. Apa yang berhasil diraih oleh Bitcoin cash tidak lepas dari dukungan yang mereka dapatkan lewat kerja sama dengan BitPay, penyedia layanan pembayaran Bitcoin, dan Blockchain, platform penyimpanan aset digital. Tidak hanya itu, Coinbase pun siap melayangkan dukungannya juga kepada Bitcoin cash mulai Januari tahun depan. Bitcoin cash sendiri memisahkan diri dari Bitcoin pada Agustus lalu sebagai buntut dari perdebatan mengenai bagaimana cara terbaik dalam meningkatkan efisiensi terhadap transaksi mata uang digital. (rou/rou)
Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase
We’re excited to announce that customers will be able to buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase. You can read more about Bitcoin Cash on our FAQ page.
Sends and receives are available immediately. Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours. See our update below.
Our customers should benefit from forks
Coinbase operates by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other networks events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange.
Bitcoin Cash was created by a fork on August 1st, 2017. All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Your Bitcoin Cash balance will reflect your Bitcoin balance at the time of the Bitcoin Cash Fork, which occurred at 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017. You can read more about what a bitcoin fork is here and our previous update on Bitcoin Cash here.
We have been monitoring the Bitcoin Cash network over the last few months and have decided to enable full support including the ability to buy, sell, send and receive. Factors we considered include developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume. You can learn more about Bitcoin Cash here.
We will abbreviate Bitcoin Cash as BCH on our platform. Customers will be able to buy Bitcoin Cash using all of our supported fiat currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD and SGD.
Coinbase maintains a strict trading policy and internal guidelines for employees. Coinbase employees have been prohibited from trading in Bitcoin Cash for several weeks.
Update on December 19 at 8:15pm
Bitcoin Cash sends and receives are functional. Buys and sells on the Coinbase website and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Coinbase's chief executive said he had emailed staff ordering them to keep the Bitcoin Cash launch a secret
One of the US's leading crypto-currency exchanges is carrying out an insider trading investigation.
Coinbase fears its own workers may have exploited its move into Bitcoin Cash - a spin-off of the original Bitcoin.
The San Francisco-based firm announced the move after Bitcoin Cash's price jumped.
Coinbase began letting its users buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Tuesday in a surprise decision but has temporarily suspended trade.
The company's chief executive intervened after several market watchers posted allegations of illegal activity on social media sites.
Brian Armstrong responded that he had repeatedly warned his staff not to disclose its launch plans to family or friends or to trade in the digital asset themselves.
"It appears the price of Bitcoin Cash on other exchanges increased in the hours before our announcement," he wrote on the blogging platform Medium.
"If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies - directly or indirectly - I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action."
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Bitcoin Cash was created four months ago
Bitcoin Cash - which is no more tangible than Bitcoin itself - came into being in August after several developers became frustrated at lengthening transaction times for the original crypto-currency.
Bitcoin Cash addressed this problem by tweaking the underlying technology - the blockchain - to allow bigger chunks of data to be processed at a time.
Although there have been other Bitcoin splits before, this "fork" was unusual in that everyone who owned the original virtual currency was offered a matching sum of Bitcoin Cash. This effectively created money out of nothing.
However, many exchanges, including Coinbase, initially refused to support the innovation, casting doubt on its prospects.
Price surge
Claims of insider dealing were not the only hitch that Coinbase experienced when it finally added support for the new asset.
Trade of Bitcoin Cash was frozen just four minutes after it began on the firm's Global Digital Asset Exchange (Gdax) and existing orders were cancelled.
The move seems to have been a reaction to an apparent price surge in Bitcoin Cash on the platform beyond its already elevated level elsewhere.
When Coinbase launched Bitcoin Cash at 17:20 PST (01:20 BST) it was valued at about $3,500 (£2,612) per coin.
At the time it suspended it, the company was quoting a price of about $8,500. It remains unclear whether or not this was a software glitch or if deals were really being made at this level.
Coinbase has yet to give a full explanation but has said that it intends to reopen Bitcoin Cash order books later on Wednesday.
Bitcoin Cash is currently the world's third biggest crypto-currency with a total market capitalisation of about $59bn, according to Coinmarketcap.
That compares with there being $77bn worth of Ethereum and $282bn worth of the original Bitcoin.
Coinbase has just added full support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – meaning you can now send, receive, buy and sell the cryptocurrency. All users will also be credited an amount of Bitcoin Cash equal to their Bitcoin balance during the hard fork that occurred August 1st, 2017.
Bitcoin Cash trading will also be available on GDAX, Coinbase’s institutional-focused exchange.
Update: As of now both Coinbase and GDAX seem to be experiencing intermittent outages and Bitcoin Cash trading has been suspended, so it may take some time until traffic settles down and Bitcoin Cash is actually available for trading.
Immediately after the announcement Bitcoin’s price fell as much as 25% to a low of $14,000, but seems to have stabilized around $16,600 as of writing, which is still down about 10% from a few hours ago.
Bitcoin Cash is up around 50% in the last few hours, trading around $3,300.
As a refresher, Bitcoin Cash was created when Bitcoin “forked” in early August, by a group of developers who wanted to alter Bitcoin’s code so the blockchain could process more transactions at a faster speed, as well as require a much lower fee. When Bitcoin core developers disagreed, a group decided to copy and modify Bitcoin’s code to create Bitcoin cash.
Originally Coinbase said they wouldn’t support Bitcoin Cash – but quickly reversed course on August 3rd to say that customers would be able to withdraw it by January 1st, 2018. However they stopped of short of saying whether or not they’d provide full support and allow it to be bought and sold. So today’s full addition of the digital currency comes as a surprise for anyone who follows the cryptocurrency world.
In a blog post, Coinbase said they considered ” developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume” when deciding to fully support the digital currency. Additionally, they gave some (brief) rational behind the decision:
“Coinbase operates by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other networks events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange. – Coinbase
Coinbase has made it clear they want to support many more digital currencies in the future, so in one sense it should be expected that the’ve added the third largest currency by market cap. But it’s a little more complicated considering there’s some drama behind Bitcoin Cash, mainly in the form of ongoing disagreements between the development teams about discrediting the other’s protocol.
Going forward, the company has a framework that will help guide it in deciding which digital currencies or assets to add next, and have said they expect to add more starting in 2018.
Note: The writer owns a small amount of cryptocurrency.
Featured Image: Coinbase
