Sent BCH to a Custodial BTC Wallet Narnia

#1

Hi Peeps,

I need some advice related to some BCH we had in Coinbase. My wife accidentally sent it to my (a Custodial Wallet - with CL Card) BTC Wallet address not fully understanding BCH & BTC are completely different Cryptos.

For context, she sent it to Wallet X (the BTC address connected to my custodial CL Card) but during the transaction from Coinbase it was sent to another Address Y (a BCH address unknown to us). When I search my X Address in Cloverpool, both X & Y Addresses show up.

For the BCH Address the ‘Total Received’ Amount matches what we transferred. But strangely there is a ‘Total Sent’ of the same amount. So it looks like BCH was then moved out to another Address, where it seems to be sitting now.

First Question here, how did the original Coinbase transaction still go through? Is there a connection between BTC & BCH? I would have thought the transaction should have just failed. But I’m no expert on the topic myself tbh.

I liken it to sending a Letter to one address, but the Post company deciding midway to send it to another address. Or Am I on the wrong track here?

Reaching out to Coinbase, they say the transaction was successful, so they wont do anything and that we need to contact the Receiving Address Owner (CL Card).

I have reached out to CL Card to get help, but am being told they can’t do anything either.

Just trying to wrap my head around and understand the situation. Anyone have any idea’s here?

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#2

The address actually encodes a smart contract bytecode. For P2PKH addresses, they work the same on both BTC and BCH because they encode the same kind of smart contract (require public key and signature to spend coins), so in that case you could just import the BTC seed in BCH wallet and get access. In case of P2PKH and since your wallet is custodial, the coins moving would mean this Narnia wallet operator swept your coins (because they have the wallet’s seed) - so open a ticket with them.

If it was SegWit address, then it works a bit different - only miners can sweep.

Problem is, SegWit addresses encode smart contract that is executed one way on BTC (require segwit contract validation) and other way on BCH (no extra validation needed). This is because SegWit was a soft fork - introduced additional consensus rules without breaking any old rules - it overloaded old P2SH addresses (addresses recognized by both networks) with additional rules, rules not recognized by BCH.

This means that if you accidentally send BCH to SegWit then any miner can sweep it.

If your address was SegWit that means some miner already swept it. In that case, look up the block that had the TX mined and see which pool mined it. Then, try to contact them. They’re under no obligation to give you the coins back, because those coins are fair game on BCH, but some pools do help users get it back for a fee.

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