Statement regarding Bcash (BCH) hard fork

On August 1st 2017 12:20 UTC a split will occur in the Bitcoin (BTC) block chain. A new block chain will be created which be incompatible with Bitcoin. Users who have BTC in their wallet on the 1st of August, will automatically have an equal amount of an altcoin called Bcash (BCH) as well.

Samourai Wallet is purely a bitcoin wallet, and there are no plans to support any altcoins including BCH. This means that you will only be able to transact with BTC. You will not be able to view BCH balances or transactions and you will not be able to send or receive BCH tokens.

So, what do I need to do?

Nothing. BCH is considered an altcoin just like a thousand other altcoins. The only difference is you get a ‘free’ amount of this altcoin just for holding BTC. You can ignore the BCH token and continue to use your Samourai Wallet as normal.

But I want my BCH…

Because Samourai Wallet is built on open standards (BIP39/44) it is highly portable, and you are always in control of your secret private keys.

In order to access your BCH tokens you will need to import your Samourai Wallet private keys into a wallet provider that supports BCH.

The safest way to access your BCH tokens is with a Trezor hardware wallet. You can easily import your Samourai Wallet into the well respected and trusted Trezor device to access and manage your BCH tokens.

We do not recommend exposing your private keys, mnemonic, or passphrase to any other software claiming to be a BCH wallet. Doing so will put your bitcoin at risk of being stolen. The user agrees not to hold Samourai liable for any lost or stolen bitcoin as a result of ignoring this warning.

Replay Protection

Prior to a few days ago there were serious concerns about the safety of user funds due to refusal by the BCH team to implement what is known as replay protection. We applaud the BCH team for finally heeding advice and merging proper replay attack protection into their software.

However, we have decided to provide our users additional counter-measures to prevent replay attacks without having to trust: a) the questionable technical capabilities of the BCH development team; b) the very last minute development process; c) the questionable motivations of certain economic actors involved in the project.

Once your Samourai Wallet detects there has been a fork on August 1st you will see a notification alerting you that there has been a chain split.

Tapping on Info will open up the new Replay Protection screen where you will be able to initiate and track the status of a transaction that will automatically split all the coins in your wallet by sending a special type of transaction to the next available bitcoin address in your wallet. This special transaction will ultimately be confirmed on the BTC block chain and rejected by the BCH block chain. After this point your bitcoin is definitively split.

You can also tap on Dismiss to ignore the notification. It should be safe to ignore the notification for this hard fork as the developers have finally implemented proper replay protection, however the decision is ultimately up to you.

Thank You

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