Nearly 40% of All BCH Are on the Move, Close to 14 Million Bitcoin Cash Transferred

An incredible 13.6 million bitcoin cash has been on the move in the past 24 hours, worth close to $1.4 billion.

While BCH usually stands far behind eth in daily value transfers, it has moved some 7x more dollars worth than eth in the past 24 hours, and close to half bitcoin’s $3.6 billion.

For bitcoin, however, that’s based on the movement of only 6% of its total supply, while for eth it’s just 2.7%. For BCH, in contrasts, it’s an incredible 38.8%.

Nearly 40% of BCH’s supply on the move, Dec 2018.
The movement of this huge sum of money does not correspond to increased transaction activity. There is no spam attack or test-run as far as we can see.

Nor is this a glitch. Another blockexplorer shows a recent movement of millions of BCH by as yet an unknown entity or entities.

Millions of BCH on the move, December 2018.
You can see there some huge sums have been moving today, but why? That, we do not know. You can see in one block, for example, there are two transactions of more than 200,000 bch. A quick look doesn’t reveal much.

One probable explanation might be that this is Coinbase. They recently announced they were moving funds around “to provide enhanced security and protection for our customers.”

They moved 856,000 bitcoins between December 1st and 6th. Unlike most other exchanges, Coinbase tends to split cold storage into many small ones, presumably so that if one is vulnerable, the rest wouldn’t be affected.

It may well be that it is this split causing a potential double counting of the same funds which may be moving to different addresses.

The screenshot from Blockchair above suggests Coinbase probably has about two million BCH, if this is indeed Coinbase.

In which case, they might be moving them following the BSV split which does not have replay protection. That means one has to be careful when they make a BSV or BCH transaction as the same funds can be spent “replayed” on the other chain and/or the private key might be revealed.

As BCH shares a pretty long history with BTC, some old bitcoiners might be able to claim BSV. In which case, the same replaying would apply.

So the most logical explanation here is that Coinbase is claiming the BSV by sending BCH and/or BTC to a new address and then with the same key sending the same coin to a BSV address so as to claim then. Then there would no longer be a replay protection risk.

BSV devs have stated they will add replay protection, but they might lack the skills to do so quickly. In any event, for something like Coinbase it would probably be best to cleanly split them, which is probably what is happening here.

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