This is a guide to sell Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash was hard forked from Bitcoin on 1st August 2017. This means anyone who held Bitcoin on this date would be able to access an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash on its own blockchain. This of course assumes that you held your private keys and didn’t leave Bitcoin with third-party custodians like Coinbase or exchanges. If so, then your ability to access Bitcoin Cash is restricted to what this custodian wishes to do. For example, Coinbase users still cannot access their Bitcoin Cash, but Coinbase plans to make it available around early next year in 2018. In the future, if you need to hold your Bitcoin private keys for future forks, you should buy a hardware wallet like Trezor, Ledger Nano S, or KeepKey.
During the subsequent months, its price against Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly, with a peak around 35% of BTC and a trough around 5%. In price terms, BCH/BTC saw a peak around 0.35 and a trough around 0.05.
A lot of Bitcoin holders see Bitcoin Cash as a sort of ‘dividend’ that is paid to them. Therefore, many Bitcoin holders want to sell their Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin, in order to increase their Bitcoin holdings. If you sold at the peak, you could have increased your Bitcoin holdings by 35%. At the time of this writing, Bitcoin Cash trades around 0.2 BTC, i.e. if you sell all your Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin, you will get 20% of your Bitcoin holdings. This is a great benefit to long-term Bitcoin holders.
Accessing your Bitcoin Cash
The first step is accessing your Bitcoin Cash in the first place. Depending on how you hold your Bitcoin and in what wallet, there are various options to access it. Here are some common ones:
Bitcoin Private Key
If you have access to your raw Bitcoin private key, then the easiest wallet that I found to use for Bitcoin Cash is Electron Cash. Electron Cash is a clone of the popular Bitcoin desktop wallet Electrum. It is open source and you’re free to audit the code. It allows you to input your private key directly, and lets you access your Bitcoin Cash that you’re entitled to.
Ledger Nano S
If you held your Bitcoin in Ledger Nano S, then you can use the same hardware wallet, Ledger Nano S, to access your Bitcoin Cash. However, note that you need a firmware upgrade to your Nano. This wipes the device out, so be extremely careful! Read the official Ledger guide for more information.
Trezor
Trezor created a handy ‘splitting tool’ that can be used to access your Bitcoin Cash. Just to be safe, make sure to send your Bitcoin Cash to another address inside Trezor, so that there’s no scope of confusing between chains. You just need to go with the splitting tool after connecting your Trezor, and ‘claim’ your BCH. Read the official Trezor guide for more information.
KeepKey
KeepKey has a simple way to claim your Bitcoin Cash. They have a beta version of the KeepKey client that you can use to access your Bitcoin Cash. Read the official KeepKey guide for more information.
Selling Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin
Now that you have access to your Bitcoin Cash, it is time to sell it for Bitcoin. For this, you need exchanges, or other ways to convert your Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin. Here are the ways to do it:
ShapeShift
ShapeShift is perhaps the simplest way to convert your Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin. All you need is a Bitcoin address, and a return Bitcoin Cash address (in case the transaction doesn’t go through for some reason). Then ShapeShift will send you a unique address to send Bitcoin Cash to, and send the Bitcoin to your address. Just like that. You don’t need to create any account, no registration, no order books, nothing. Of course, you will likely pay a higher fee going through ShapeShift but it is a very simple option and definitely very convenient.
Changelly
Changelly is very similar to ShapeShift in that you just select that you want to convert Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin, and it just does the conversion for you, sending Bitcoin to the address that you specify. They do ask for a basic account via email but nothing too elaborate. There’s no need for order books though, and you get your Bitcoin instantly to your wallet.
Online Exchanges
By now, you probably are a user at several online exchanges. These are proper exchanges in that there is an order book and you can put market orders or limit orders to sell your Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin. There are several exchanges today that trade the pair BCH/BTC, depending on your accounts.
If you’re not on any crypto exchanges and want to trade BCH/BTC pair, Bittrex is probably the best place to trade. If not, HitBTC and Poloniex are also good options.