Warning: this guide reveals the exact method the author used to claim free Bitcoin CasH and exchange it for Bitcoin on the 2nd of August. While every reasonable effort has been made to ensure complete and accurate information, the author cant guarantee a successful outcome for those following this method.

Waiting for better documented methods and more familiar exchanges to offer BCH deposits is the safer play in this situation. However, as more people figure out how to sell their coins, profitability may well decrease.

Bitcoin Cash (aka Bcash, BCH or BCC) forked off from Bitcoin on the 1st of August and its launch has proven rather rocky. Three days later, only 2 exchanges are supporting Bcash deposits and its price has crashed on both.

It still takes relatively a lot of time to get Bcash transactions into the blockchain and thats due to the high difficulty of mining.Bcash forked with the same mining difficulty as Bitcoin but only a small fraction (around 5%) of its hashrate. Bcashs first (or genesis block) took around 7 hours to be found.

The difficulty adjustment process was meant to compensate for this, reducing difficulty to a level more appropriate for Bcashs low hashrate within a few blocks.However, miners from Genesis Block, an aptly named, high-tech hostel in Hong Kong, apparently began mining Bcash for fun and marketing purposes.

The hostels additional, unexpected hashpower greatly delayed Bcashs difficulty adjustment process. As a result, Bcash blocks remain slow, although difficulty has since adjusted to about of Bitcoins. You can use this Bitcoin Cash block explorer to see the status of the current blocks (take a look at the bottom).

If you held any bitcoin in a personal wallet (or on certain exchange wallets listed here) then congrats, you own an equal amount of Bcash too!

If you wish to sell your Bcash, there are 2 things you need to do, in the following order:

If your BTC was held on one of the exchanges listed, the exchange will have taken care of this process for you. When you log in, you should see a BCH (or possibly, BCC) balance in a new exchange wallet, in addition to your regular BTC wallet. The amounts in both wallets should match, assuming you havent made any recent trades or transactions.

If your bitcoins were held in a personal wallet, youll have to split them yourself. We cover splitting forLedger,TREZOR and for the Electrum software wallet. Note that the general procedure used for Electrum is applicable to other software wallets, although the precise steps will vary.

For those whose bitcoins were held on an exchange which split BCH from BTC and offers a market in BCH trading, youre already done sell your BCH whenever you feel like it.

Everyone else will have to decide between the three exchanges currently accepting BCH deposits; HitBTC,ViaBTCand Bittrex. I used HitBTC for two good reasons:

Keep in mind that because HitBTC is one of the only exchanges allowing to actually deposit BCH many people are selling it on the platform which causes the exchange rate to be lower than on other platforms.

Claiming Bitcoin Cash in Ledger Nano S

Claiming Bitcoin Cash in TREZOR

Claiming Bitcoin Cash in Electrum

Claiming Bitcoin Cash in ExodusClaiming Bitcoin Cash in Blochchain.info and other wallets

Selling BTC for BCC

Splitting with ledger is a fairly simple process but not an intuitive one, make sure to follow these exact steps:

Throughout the process you will need to update your firmware, this will wipe all of the data from your device. Make sure to have a back up before moving forward or you will lose all of your coins.

Download the Ledger Manager for chrome, go to Firmwares on the left hand side and click on Install. You will then be prompted to confirm this action on your device. Once the update is complete you will need to import your wallet from your seed phrase. The complete steps to this process can be found here.

Once you have a firmware version that is 1.3.1 and above, you can move on to step 3.

Inside the Ledger Manager, go to application and download the Bitcoin Cash app (2nd from the top).

If you had Bitcoins before the fork, Ledger now splits those Bitcoins into BTC and BCH but keeps them on the same wallet. Its recommended to use a separate (aka split) wallet to manage your BCH. This step isnt mandatory but is advised. If you wish to skip this step move straight to step 6.

Connect your ledger and select Bitcoin Cash from the available options on the device. The following screen will open:

Select Bitcoin Cash. The following screen will ask if you want to access the main wallet (BTC and BCH combined) or the split wallet (Only BCH). Select split.

Go to receive and generate a BCH address. You will later send your Main wallets BCH to this address. Once you have your BCH address move to step 5.

Go to settings Blockchains and this time choose Bitcoin Cash and Main.

This wallet holds your newly formed BCH along with your BTC. Its now time to send them to your split wallet.

Go to send and send your BCH to your split wallet address which youve retrieved on step 4.

You can now go to Settings Blockchains and log back into your split wallet. You will need to wait for a new BCH block to be mined until you can see that your transaction is confirmed. Once its confirmed you can send your BCH into an exchange or hold on to them.For the official ledger guide click here.

Due to only having a week to prepare for the launch of the final version of Bcash code, Trezors wallet does not currently support BCH (although theyre working on a fix). It is however possible to use an online tool by TREZOR in order to split your BCH and simultaneously send it to a BCH address.

Thoroughly review Trezors guide to this processand check their Twitter and subreddit for any updates. Sometimes the tool is offline and recently some bugs were found in it.

Step 1 Visit the beta version of Trezor wallet. You should use Google Chrome to access the wallet; the author was unable to complete the process using Firefox or a clean install thereof.

Make sure that youre on the beta site: https://beta-wallet.trezor.io

The reason for visiting the beta Trezor wallet is that it enables you to update your Trezors firmware to the latest, beta version (1.5.1). Particularly if you havent performed this process before, you should study Trezors guide to firmware updates.

Step 2 Be certain you have a backup of your seed phrase and update your firmware. This is done as follows:

Step 3 Go to the Coin Splitting Tool. Click on Connect with TREZOR. Reconnect your device and enter the PIN as usual.

Step 4 Select the account you want to split BCH from and enter an address to send the BCH to. It is possible to enter the exchange funding address directly in this stage (see below how to get a deposit address for HitBTC).

If you have an Electrum Bitcoin wallet, we suggest you follow this excellent guide put together by the Electrum developers. In case that any of this doesnt make complete sense to you, please dont use this method its pretty risky.

Heres a TL;DR version of it:

Step 1 Write down all of your Bitcoin addresses that had Bitcoins in them during the fork.

Step 2 Go to Wallet Private Keys Export and write down only the keys that are related to the addresses youve found in step 1.

Step 3 Move all of your Bitcoins to a new Electrum wallet (create a new wallet throughfile new/restore). Youre doing this so that if any of the private keys you exported are compromised in some way, your Bitcoins will be in a new address with a different private key.

Step 4 ON A DIFFERENT COMPUTER install the Electron Cash wallet. Heres the reason why it needs to be on a different machine:

Step 5 Import your private keys into Electron Cash. Once done you can use your new coins via that wallet.

The following process was supplied by one of our users and not tested by us. Use it with caution. In any case of uncertainly please contact Exodus support (they are VERY helpful and fast to respond):

Step 1 download the latest version of the Exodus desktop wallet from the Exodus website.Step 2 Create your account on Hitbtc as already stated in the article and get your BCC address.Step 3 Install the Exodus wallet and click on Help menu on the left panel. Scroll down to the menu items on the right and click on the menu called How do I claim my bitcoin cash (BCH).Step 4 Keep your BCC address (that you got from Hitbtc) handy and follow the instructions. It will calculate the amount of BTC that was in the Exodus wallet before 1st August 2017 and ask you the BCC address where you want to transfer the BCC.Step 5 Enter the BCC address and transfer. It might take 2-4hrs for the transfer to take place.To convert the BCC to BTC and transfer it back to your Exodus wallet and continue following this article.

Here is the original article from Exodus.

Update: around October 2017 Blockchain.info will add Bitcoin Cash support and you will automatically be able to see your Bitcoin Cash balance. More info can be found here.

On old Blockchain.info wallets Login and then go to Settings > Addresses on the left.

Then find your address that has your BTC balance (which held BTC at the time of the 8/1 fork) and click on More Options, then Private Keys. After that just follow the same sequence as in the Electrum guide.

In the new version of Blockchain.info you should go to security wallet recovery phrase and write down your 12 word seed.After that just follow the same sequence as in the Electrum guide.

Heres a guide for getting your BCC from Mycelium.

Heres a great video about Getting you BCH from software wallets:

The order of sequence laid out in the Electrum guide will be safe for any software wallet, as far as we know. The major point to keep in mind is that you must generate a new wallet (not just a new address), send your bitcoins to the new wallet, and only then is it safe to export the private key of your old wallet into your Bcash wallet. If youre unsure how to accomplish any of these steps, its best to wait for a detailed guide for your specific wallet.

HitBTC is a European exchange (apparently headquartered in Hong Kong) which has been operational since 2013. They dont seem to have experienced any major hacks or other negative events in that time, which is good going by crypto exchange standards.

Here are the steps for exchange BCH on HitBTC

Step 1 sign up for an account

Step 2 Sign in and navigate to your Bcash wallet by selecting the Account.

scroll down to BCC in the list of coins and click the Fund button (circle with +). Your BCC deposit address will now be generated and displayed.Note that BCC addresses look just like Bitcoin address, so be very careful that you dont confuse the two!

Step 3 Send the BCC from your wallet into your HitBTC BCC account.

Step 4 Wait for at least 2 blocks to be mined on the Bcash network.

Step 5 Move your coins into your trading account. Click the rightwards facing arrow icon, then on the expanded bar, input or verify the amount to transfer. Finally, click transfer.

Step 6 Select the Exchange tab at the top left and select the currency you wish to sell your BCH for.Make the exchange. The simplest way to sell is via a market order. This will sell as many BCH as you specify at the best available price(s).

There are other types of orders which may allow you to get a better price for your BCH. Check out Limit orders too, which allow you to place a sell order for your chosen amount of BCH into the order book at a specific price. This allows you to wait for the market to meet your price, although be aware that if your price is too high the coins may never sell. In this case, you will have to cancel your active order and place a new one at a lower price level.

Step 8 Withdraw your bitcoins, or other currency. Return to the Account tab, then transfer your BTC (or whichever currency you sold for) from your trading to your deposit / withdrawal account.

The withdraw dialog will then require your Bitcoin address. Ensure that you paste a Bitcoin address from a Bitcoin wallet under your control, not the Bcash address you used to deposit funds initially!

Congratulations, youve just increased your bitcoin holdings with almost no work! HitBTC sends out withdrawals almost immediately so you should soon be able to see your unconfirmed transaction in any block explorer.

Of course, youre not forced to sell your BCH. You may wish to hold it, perhaps because you believe in the coins long term prospects or think patience will be rewarded with a better price.

Bcash is currently trading above $300 on most exchanges, which in this authors opinion is high for an altcoin with no established economy, unknown developers, vulnerably low hashrate and no real technical innovations.

Rhetoric aside, Bcash offers no tangible advantages over Bitcoin. The codebase has been gutted of major Bitcoin protocol upgrades, such as SegWit and Replace By Fee.

Bcash addresses scaling by the relatively crude means of multiplying its maximum block size from 1 to 8 megabytes. This has the consequence of increasing operational demands across all nodes; likely increasing miner centralisation.

Each new block transmits coins onto exchanges, releasing pent-up selling pressure. Given the limited liquidity of these exchanges, the result is a steep drop as many coins are sold simultaneously. This pattern may be clearly seen in the following chart:

BCH/BTC 1 minute chart with recent blocks demarcated. Notice that price drops coincide with volume spikes.

Waiting for a block can be a tedious process. Currently, the best way to monitor Bcash blocks in real-time is via this block explorer. Bcash blocks currently take around 2 hours to find (but may take much longer).

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How to Claim Your Bitcoin Cash and Sell it for Bitcoin ...