The Rock Trading and Bitcoin Hard Fork

Hello rockers,

recently we have been asked several times what we are going to do in case of a bitcoin hard fork by Bitcoin Unlimited and miners supporting it.

TheRockTrading, along with other exchanges, has signed a public document trying to clarify our position on the matter. As far as I understood, it did not clarified much because each side has read it according to their own vision :-).

I’ll try here to make things a little bit clearer, speaking from TheRockTrading point of view, by trying to give quick answers to common questions about hard fork we are receiving.

Will you double my coin?

No. Is that clear?

And if you are hoping for an hard fork, just because you see it as an opportunity to double your coins, you are not making a smart move.

Will you support both chains?

Do not know. I am sorry to have to answer this way, but honestly, we can’t know if we will. We may, yes.

First of all let me say that as an exchange we do not have anything against supporting Bitcoin Unlimited chain. We do have our own personal opinion (and different ones inside our team too), but it does not matter much. As an exchange, if we can support both and let our customers choose what they prefer to trade on, we will.

However, what we currently know is that we can handle Bitcoin Core, that it is currently the main chain, that its software has been running smoothly since years, 24h per day, and that we intend to continue to offer trading of Bitcoin as usual.

What we do not know is if the supposed hard fork will take place, when and how. We do not know what it will happen after hard fork exactly (can’t expect the unexpected, especially on hard forks). If you add to this that Bitcoin Unlimited software has not been known to be production ready, you can easily understand that — as a business — we cannot guarantee we will be able to support also this chain.

These are pratical issues we have.

Last but not least, even if not comparable, have a look at our stance on ETH hard fork about theDAO. We were able to support only one chain, and not even the one we prefer, but pratical reasons led us to support only ETH.

As a TheRockTrading customer what should I do?

Since we can’t currently guarantee we will be able to handle both your splitted bitcoin in case of an hard fork, your safest option would be to withdraw to your own wallet, take control of your bitcoins completely and decide after the fork what to do.

Will the hard fork happens and when?

It’s unlikely in my personal opinion: blockchain is ofter referred as a disruptive technology, and it is so mainly because it’s not disruptive of itself.

For sure we do not know when it will happen, so can’t anticipate much.