I claimed my Bitcoin Cash and You Can Too

I grabbed more than a grand with half a day of research.

A quick disclaimer — my grandma asked me about buying cryptocurrency a few weeks ago. I gave her the best advice, but basically encouraged her to do her own research, and not bet the farm with my inheritance ;-). That goes for you too. Don’t take anything I write here as canon, and read, read, read before you decide to risk any funds, crypto or otherwise.

The backstory — I bought just under 1 BTC back in the Mt Gox days for about $80 bucks. Thankfully I withdrew the currency into a local MultiBit wallet before Mt Gox became insolvent. Eventually I switched to the followup wallet called Multibit HD. For the most part, I completely forgot about Bitcoin until the recent cryptocurrency surge (Dec 2017).

eeek, just the logo makes me shudder

Anyway, on August 1, 2017, a bunch of the Bitcoin miners decided to create a new currency called Bitcoin Cash. They performed a “hard fork” and basically anyone that owned Bitcoin before the split now owned both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — and was entitled to the same amount of Bitcoin Cash that they already owned in Bitcoin.

I mostly ignored this, but in the past week, since Coinbase started listing Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the new currency, BCH, skyrocketed in value.

trajectory of bitcoin cash

Between August 1 and today, I had sold off a chunk of my original BTC for “real money” (also via Coinbase). But I started doing research and it turns out that if I owned one BTC on August 1, I still was entitled to one BCH regardless of my actions after the August 1 fork.

So after some Googling, the best tutorial I found about how to claim BCH from Multibit HD (or various other wallets) was here:

How to get Bitcoin Cash from many wallet/software/services with Coinomi : Coinomi Support_While we enjoy being market leaders, we still believe synergy and cooperation is the best way forward for all involved…_coinomi.freshdesk.com

But unfortunately this only worked for Coinomi, an Android app. I didn’t have an Android device lying around. And I’d rather be chemically castrated than go to Walmart to buy one three days before Christmas.

DROID!

After banging my head against a wall (and watching BCH lose value), I found a Stack Exchange article about how to claim Bitcoin Cash from my Multibit HD Wallet. Essentially, since I still had my wallet words written down from MultiBit HD, I was able to input them into Electron Cash and actually claim my BCH. (It was slightly more complicated than that, see the Stack Exchange article for deetz).

electron cash

After I got the BCH funds in my Electron Cash wallet, I transferred the BCH over to Coinbase and sold it immediately for USD, because USD can buy last-minute Christmas presents, and mythical coin money can’t (yet).

When I’m not pretending that I know WTF I am doing with Bitcoin, I also run a site called SIMMER.io for sharing WebGL games. If you’re into games or game development check it out!

And don’t forget to clap or follow me on Medium if you enjoyed this article. It provides great motivation for me to keep writing!