Summary

A subsection of the Bitcoin economy including prominent businesses such as Coinbase, Xapo, and BitPay have signed an agreement to adopt and implement a contentious hard fork of Bitcoin sometime in November. A hard fork is a backwards incompatible change to the Bitcoin network. This hard fork is not supported by the majority of the Bitcoin users and developers and is therefore a contentious hard fork. By adopting this hard fork, we believe the supporters of this agreement are shifting their users to an alternative currency (an altcoin) which is incompatible with Bitcoin.

The signatories of this agreement wrongly believe that the currency created by adopting this contentious hard fork will eventually become Bitcoin. Therefore storing any BTC on services such as Coinbase, Bitpay and Xapo is strongly not recommended. By storing BTC on these services, you could find that after the hard fork, your BTC has been renamed to something else or replaced entirely with the new altcoin. The best way to ensure that your BTC is protected is to download the latest version of Bitcoin Core and transfer out any BTC stored on services that are a signatory to this agreement. We have listed the businesses supporting this contentious hard fork at the bottom of this document.

For users who aren’t prepared to install Bitcoin Core and go through the lengthy set up process, we recommend a wallet such as GreenAddress, Electrum or TREZOR. Avoid using web wallets like blockchain.info. However users should only use these wallets to store their coins and never perform transactions until well after the hard fork. Any transactions you make on the Bitcoin blockchain can also be replicated and “replayed” on the altcoin chain. If the coins on the contentious hard fork have any value, there will be methods you can use to “split” your coins and have access to them. Pay extra attention to major Bitcoin communication channels and media shortly after the fork so you stay informed.