Splitting Ethereum Classic on GDAX

I wanted to write this post because I was having trouble finding information specific to my situation. I am a total cryptonoob with limited coding skills and a SteemitNoob to boot. I set up an account on GDAX back in June and bought a small amount of Ethereum--almost immediately before the DAO exploit. I hadn't made a move since weeks before the fork.

The Long Story

All of a sudden, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is rocketing up coinmarketcap.com, and by all accounts I should be entitled to an amount equivalent to my Ethereum (ETH) holdings. The process of scouring the web for information first led to reddit where the general advice was that moving the unsplit token and coin could leave me vulnerable to attack. I had a Poloniex account and some people were saying that they were splitting the coin and token automatically, but it was unclear to me at the time whether sending Ethereum to Poloniex from GDAX would achieve the same effect. They apparently stopped splitting the coin for people before I could even make an attempt anyway.

I sent an email to GDAX support. Surprise! They never replied. Well, they did reply only to ask me if the ticket was still open several days later. Some more scaremongering on reddit assured that GDAX/Coinbase was hacked of all their ETC. Luckily this was pretty swiftly discredited when GDAX issued this statement. But the "in the coming weeks" part left me uneasy.

Finally, I came across this post from @pauls. If you haven't checked it out and you are a noob like me--do it. It didn't resolve my problem, that is apparently impossible to resolve at this time, but it introduced me to the mist wallet (which I hadn't used before), contracts, gas, etherscan.io, gastracker.io, and is generally a great resource for background and reference.

I promptly moved a small amount of ETH to my new Mist wallet. I checked my ETH balance on etherscan.io and it confirmed my balance, but gastracker.io showed zero ETC in Mist. I tried to run the split contract anyway, and no ETC hit my Poloniex account. The ETC was already split, but when? I checked the ETH balance on the deposit address of my GDAX account--there was a zero balance. Yet, I'm looking at the screen and see a balance. Plus, I just sent some to my shiny new Mist wallet! Surely it's user error. I'll try following the bread crumbs.

We are now at a full 6 days after the initial email to GDAX with no response. No updates on twitter. No statements on the site. Nothing. I mentioned earlier that my deposit address had zero ETH in it on etherscan.io but showed a balance in my account. Looking at the recent transactions I could see where they sent the small amount of ETH to my new wallet, but there were also two other transactions. The first loaded it up with what seemed like a random amount of ETH, and the other zeroed out the account. Then it became pretty clear that they either cold store all their Ethereum in one wallet or pool it all in other web wallets. Today they issued this tweet in response to the BitFinex hack confirming that 98% of customer funds are cold-stored. It's starting to make sense now.

The Short Story

So where does that leave us? How do we get to our rightful digital property back? It seems our hands are tied for now. The ETC had already been split from the ETH withdrawn to my wallet. Presumably (hopefully), it's all cold-stored somewhere until they figure out what they are going to do with it. Keep blasting support and their twitter demanding compensation. Cross fingers.

IMO

Meanwhile, ETH price suffers from the compound blow of rapidly rising ETC support as well as market share, and investor uncertainty after the Bitcoin heist from BitFinex. It seems particularly shady to me that they would hodl ETC for WEEKS when most of the rightful owners would probably dump it anyway. Aren't they supposed to be in support of the fork and Ethereum Foundation? Seems like the type of strategy one uses to drive up the price. And the scariest part of all is that a huge chunk of ETC is still tied up in DarkDAOs.

I appreciate any comments or corrections.

Thank you!

EDIT: This was my first blog post. Don't make the same mistake I did. THE MAIN TAG IS IMPORTANT AND LOOKS SUPER HARD TO CHANGE! -_-