Well, the problem is that this means exchanges need to actually implement support for every chain. If I tomorrow go muck around with my bitcoin node and make it fork, why shouldn't they be required to issue you IOUs for that altcoin as well, after all? What if they didn't know that a fork happened, went and rotated all their cold storage keys, destroyed the old private keys, and later you ask for your coins on the secret chain?
You have to draw the line somewhere, and, as a practical concern, determining that a fork meets this line retroactively adds a great deal of complexity and risk to the process. Further, as we've seen here, even a short delay in executing the split raises a great deal of ire and threats of lawsuits.
So, as I see it, the only consistent positions to take would be to either:
1. Not require split tracking at all. People who want to enjoy the benefits of such a split can simply move their bitcoins to a wallet under their direct control, or to an exchange who has agreed to track the split. [what happened here - a market-driven solution, essentially]
2. To legally mandate split tracking if proponents of the split agree to make a market - that is, agree to buy at a particular price for a particular period of time - thus ensuring that the coins have value [unlikely to ever come into play due to the enormous cost of such a venture]
3. To legally mandate split tracking for absolutely every altcoin, no matter how awkward or technically difficult it may be to do so.
Keep in mind that implementing 3 means the exchange might need to run software created by the altcoin's promoters - because keeping up with your own software for every altcoin would take too much development resources - and would be exposed to the exchange's private keys in order to perform hot wallet transactions that the altcoin's network will accept. Thus, if exchanges are forced to run software from any random Joe's fork, this would present a real security risk that backdoored software might be slipped in - this means that they would be forced to switch to split wallets by customer so a single customer using JoeCoin won't compromise funds held by other customers, but having this split out makes maintaining cold wallets impractical.
> Well, the problem is that this means exchanges need to actually implement support for every chain
No, read my comment again, carefully. If they are providing IOUs for BTC, that means there is no private key associated with the debt. If say for instance they owe a user 10 BTC, they could give them any 10 BTC. if a new chain pops up, it doesn't matter, because the contract is explicitly an IOU for 10 BTC, not BCH or BCC.
the problem arises when the exchange implies they are holding "your coins" for you like a safe deposit box, which means there's a private key associated with the coins, and thus that key would work with any chain splits, including BCH/BCC.
just curious, do you understand how blockchains work? i.e. private keys and the transaction protocol? if you weren't familiar with it, then that would explain why you are having a hard time understanding my comment.
I think I misread your comment - I had interpreted it as suggesting that exchanges should be required to issue IOUs for new forked assets, which has serious practical issues.
Of course, saying that coinbase balances are IOUs for bitcoins is basically what happened here, and apparently people aren't happy about it. While you could change the marketing material, I don't think it would do much to change the outrage in this case; I very much doubt people will pay attention to such a nuance when they apparently couldn't be bothered to temporarily withdraw their coins.
You have to draw the line somewhere, and, as a practical concern, determining that a fork meets this line retroactively adds a great deal of complexity and risk to the process. Further, as we've seen here, even a short delay in executing the split raises a great deal of ire and threats of lawsuits.
So, as I see it, the only consistent positions to take would be to either:
1. Not require split tracking at all. People who want to enjoy the benefits of such a split can simply move their bitcoins to a wallet under their direct control, or to an exchange who has agreed to track the split. [what happened here - a market-driven solution, essentially]
2. To legally mandate split tracking if proponents of the split agree to make a market - that is, agree to buy at a particular price for a particular period of time - thus ensuring that the coins have value [unlikely to ever come into play due to the enormous cost of such a venture]
3. To legally mandate split tracking for absolutely every altcoin, no matter how awkward or technically difficult it may be to do so.
Keep in mind that implementing 3 means the exchange might need to run software created by the altcoin's promoters - because keeping up with your own software for every altcoin would take too much development resources - and would be exposed to the exchange's private keys in order to perform hot wallet transactions that the altcoin's network will accept. Thus, if exchanges are forced to run software from any random Joe's fork, this would present a real security risk that backdoored software might be slipped in - this means that they would be forced to switch to split wallets by customer so a single customer using JoeCoin won't compromise funds held by other customers, but having this split out makes maintaining cold wallets impractical.