LocalBitcoins completes user credit and swap of Bitcoin Cash for BTC

LocalBitcoins, the service for over-the-counter trading of bitcoin for local currency informed today they finished compensating customers who held bitcoin on their account at the time of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) airdrop on August 1st with the corresponding BCH to BTC rate. The company previously stated they wouldn’t support BCH and will stick to that decision. BCH was created in such a way that everyone who had access to a private key holding a bitcoin balance received a corresponding amount of Bcash on the other blockchain. Since the August 1st airdrop, the LocalBitcoins team said they received numerous requests to support the new crypto. The team’s response follows: “LocalBitcoins has decided against supporting Bcash, for various reasons. Our primary focus is to provide easy access and global liquidity for Bitcoin and to ensure the security of Bitcoins held in customer accounts. Adding support to an alternative cryptocurrency that shares address space with Bitcoin would have significantly shifted resources away from this main focus. We believe supporting Bcash would create confusion and complicated situations e.g. due to the possibility of sending Bitcoins to Bcash addresses, which would result in extra hassle and possibly loss of funds for our customers.” Thus, instead of providing support for Bcash, the company converted all Bcash to bitcoin, and shared all of the converted amounts between the users who held a bitcoin balance in their wallets at the time of the creation of Bcash. Any open trades that had any balance at the time were also taken into consideration, based on who received the Bitcoin after the trade was completed or closed. LocalBitcoins noted that the processing fee for the conversion was 0.0002 BTC per account. This means that sums smaller than 0.0002 BTC were not compensated. Eligible users for the compensation have already received the corresponding amount of Bitcoin to their LocalBitcoins wallet. The team finished their update by stating that customers should not expect any previous or future cryptocurrency airdrops to be compensated or supported by the company, as their focus will remain on their core business.