Australian exchanges change their tune on Bitcoin SV

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Australian exchanges have not been favourable towards Bitcoin SV (BSV) and have resorted in taking political stances whilst running their exchange business. This includes refusing to list BSV as a trading option, illegally withholding access to users claiming their rightfully owned BSV coins or keeping BSV listed with misleading ticker symbols (like BCHSV).

It appears the Australian exchanges are finally starting to understand their own business interests needed for survival long-term and have started to get their act together.

Independent Reserve, one of the major Australian exchanges now allows its 120,000 users to easily purchase BSV directly with AUD after their decision yesterday to finally list BSV on their exchange.

We are excited to announce that we have listed Bitcoin SV #BSV and Tether #USDT!

Deposits and withdrawals will be activated on Sunday with trading going live on Tuesday. There will be an introductory brokerage fee for $BSV and $USDT of 0.2% for the first two weeks ⚡ pic.twitter.com/752RdPcgSv

— Independent Reserve (@indepreserve) February 5, 2020

Independent Reserve’s ideological stance has been apparent with their decision making from November 2018 when BCH decided to fork away and BSV emerged to preserve the original Bitcoin protocol. Not only did they refuse to list BSV as a trading option, but they withheld customers from accessing their BSV coins they would have had legal rights to at the time of the fork.

As an exchange that prides itself on being regulatory compliant, they most certainly would have been subject to facing class action law suit from their customers. Irresponsible decisions by exchanges that impact the customers funds can lead to serious legal issues like Kraken exchange are facing now.

Albeit late, Independent Reserve have also taken corrective action in confirming to their customers that if they held BCH in their account during the fork November 16, 2018, at 3:40am AEST then they will be credited with equal amounts of BSV.

The turn of events by Independent Reserve is not by coincidence. It comes on the back of its two biggest competitors in the Australian market BTC Markets and Coin Spot also taking their own corrective measures by fixing the ticker symbol from ‘BCHSV’ to ‘BSV’.

Thanks @BTCMarkets for sorting out the BSV issue and instating the correct ticker. pic.twitter.com/wvKV2vrrFS

— Eli Afram (@justicemate) January 16, 2020

When @coinspotau when will we be able to send #Bitcoin into a coinspot wallet without first swapping for #BTC ?

Btw, great work fixing the naming error with BSV. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/SWayAQVDAg

— Bnjmin (@benjaminicholas) December 1, 2019

Although tickers symbols do not represent the underlying value of Bitcoin, it certainly serves no purpose other than confusing newcomers into the space when they are trying to make an informed decision about what version of Bitcoin to invest in.

Exchanges continue to show that they play a very small role in the industry. Any self-serving decisions that try to preserve their threatened business models which are reliant on earning fees by multiple coins trading, and at the same time choose to take a stance against BSV as it has an opposite and ambitious goal to be the one, global blockchain for everything will come back to bite these exchanges in the future. Failure in offering any real value will only make them become obsolete even sooner as they are restricting offerings that are in their customers’ best interests and they will simply look elsewhere.

Australia has proven that the free market continues to self-regulate.

These are the Australian exchanges that easily allow you to purchase BSV directly with AUD: BTC Markets, Independent Reserve, Coin Spot, Coin Tree, Mine Digital Exchange (BSV listing coming soon).