Hello all,
I am owning some bitcoins and other alt coins since a while and I have been reading a lot over here in stealth modus, really helpful.
Now there is a fork coming up and I am confused;
As far as I can see a fork is like a share split of a company. Like Pfizer dId with zoetis in the US. The owners of shares in Pfizer also get shares in zoetis for free, right?
If you own BTC at the time of a hardfork, you also own BCH, Bitcoin Gold, B2X, etc on the new fork. For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCH, 1 Bitcoin Gold, 1 B2X, etc.
It's basically like someone created a new bank account for you, mirroring your balance by using your old account statements, but at a new bank and with a new currency.
Now let's say I have my bitcoin stored at coinbase. Do I automatically get the fork shares? Does coinbase support it? Or do I have to put them in a different wallet?
Do I have to claim them?
That is unclear to me. Maybe somebody can help me and probably some others out on this subject?
Coinbase supporting Bitcoin Gold seems unlikely. So far it looks like Coinbase will support B2X, but I wouldn't bet on it unless they renew their commitment in an official statement.
If you want to access fork coins that Coinbase does not support, you need to move your BTC to a wallet of your own
before the fork happens. Don't forget to account for confirmation times. A wallet of your own is a wallet like Electrum or Bitcoin Core, ie. a wallet where you have direct access to your own private keys.
After the fork you need to import these private keys (or the recovery seed words) into a wallet that supports Bitcoin Gold or B2X respectively. Using the wallet of the respective Bitcoin fork, you can freely access your coins. However you don't need to "claim" them or access them right away. As long as you have the private keys you can access your forked coins any time in the future.