4 Ways to Avoid Losing Money on BCH and BSV Exchange
If you had some BCH before November 2018 and didn’t split it from BSV after the hard fork at that time, you may lose your money on either BCH or BSV transactions today. This happens because of the double-spending problem which these networks are not protected from. Splitting your BCH from BSV is the solution. Why and how you can do this are the questions we’ll answer in this article.
How does it work?
On November 15th, 2018, a hard fork happened in the BCH network. This is how the new cryptocurrency BSV was created. If you had any BCH before the fork, you should have automatically got an equal amount of BSV on your wallet. Everything would go well if there were any replay protection between the two networks. Since there is none, a double-spending case may occur whenever you send your BCH or BSV elsewhere.
Let’s give it an example. You had some BCH on your wallet before November 2018 and haven’t split your coins ever since. (If you got your BCH after the fork, everything will be fine). You decided to buy some BTC with 10 BCH on ChangeNOW. You send us 10 Bitcoin Cash, but then you find out that 10 Bitcoin SV have also been sent from your wallet without you even knowing it. You are understandably frustrated, and our support team is trying to catch as much as possible of those 10 BSV and return them back to you. Sadly, this is not possible in 100% cases, and some of those funds ultimately get lost.
This happens because the system does not recognize your BCH and BSV as different assets. They are stored on one address, and since there is no double-spending protection, your BSV will be sent together with BCH (or vice versa).
How do I avoid this?
Splitting your coins is the solution. The way of doing this depends on the wallet you store your BCH at.
Guarda Wallet and other
- Make a deposit on your BCH address that is bigger than the amount of BSV you have.
- Create a new BCH wallet. For this, click + Add Wallet, select currency — BCH.
- Send all your BCH from the old address to a new one. Because the sum is larger than the amount of BSV you have, your BSV will not be transferred along with BCH.
- Profit! The connection between your BCH and BSV was disrupted. The coins are split now.
You can also use this method in case you store your BCH on a different wallet. Simply transfer your funds to Guarda Wallet and follow the same steps.
Atomic Wallet
Atomic Wallet recommends sending your BCH to your wallet address at any of the exchanges that support both BCH and BSV, and then withdrawing either of BCH or BSV back to your Atomic Wallet address. The currencies will go back separately. However, we recommend you to consider other ways to split your coins as the centralized exchanges require registration and may lack in security.
Coinomi
Another way to split your coins was introduced by Coinomi support. This method is a little more advanced, however, it doesn’t require any third-party entities’ participation. You’ll need to receive a new small amount of already split Bitcoin Cash into your BCH wallet, and then perform a few other steps.
A very similar pattern has been recently described for Electron Cash — Electron SV wallets.
Electron Cash Wallet and other
This is an advanced method that requires quite an experience in using crypto wallets. Here, you need to obtain an Electron Cash wallet and switch the branches in the settings. The full path was described here — and recommended for use in an official EC Wallet statement. If you choose this option, please mind all the updates in that post and learn more from the EC dev Mark Lundeberg’s guide.
Final words
Working with unsplit BCH/BSV coins results in losing your funds. Despite there’s no simple universal way to split your assets, we wish you patience with choosing and trying the methods listed above — because money loss is always painful. Your efforts are undoubtedly worth the result that you will get. Good luck!
