Coinbase not under obligation to hand over Bitcoin Gold from 2017 BTC fork – California Court

A California court has ruled in favour of COINBASE after it said the company should not return Bitcoin Gold gotten from a BTC hard fork in 2017.

A well-versed crypto lawyer, Justin Wales have given a big thumbs up to the court ruling while noting that the verdict showed that if a client loses a key, he no longer owns the digital assets. In the case of Darrell Archer and Coinbase, the former sued the digital assets company for denying him access to the Bitcoin Gold he mined using the BTC fork. 

According to Archer, he had no less than 350 Bitcoin on Coinbase platform when he used the fork, and it would have given him nothing less than $159,000 worth of Bitcoin Gold at the time.

Justin Wales lauds court decision to return the Bitcoin Gold to Coinbase

To dismiss Archer’s claims, Justin Wales said Archer shot himself in the leg after he relinquished ownership of the digital assets to Coinbase. 

It should be noted that you can only access your forked coins if you don’t own your private keys. According to the California Court of Appeals ruling, it reviewed Coinbase user agreement, and it found no condition to hand over the Bitcoin Gold in question. 

On Coinbases’ part, it said it gave the client several reasons why it does not provide support to Bitcoin Gold like the way it provides support to Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash.

Coinbase warns users not to send digital assets to wallets that they don’t control

Wales noted that it was the right judgement to rule in favour of Coinbase keeping the Bitcoin Gold as other courts around California would have done the same thing. 

Not your keys, not your coins is a phenomenon that is used by crypto outfits to let users know that once they lose their keys, then they have lost their digital assets. Even though Coinbase is home to millions of customers, the firm has warned users against sending digital assets to wallets that are not in their control.