It's more like HP shares splitting into HP and Agilent, and your brokerage deciding that it won't track your ownership stake in Agilent and not giving you any further access to obtain your Agilent stock.

Under these circumstances, you'd have serious reservations about passively parking any assets with that particular broker...

That's one possible analogy. Another analogy would be: an unrelated third-party decides to give, to everyone who has HP shares, an equivalent number of shares in a new company. In that case, a broker would be under no obligation to give you these new shares.

Which analogy is the best one depends on your point of view on this debate.

> a broker would be under no obligation to give you these new shares.

No obligation would exist, but I'd rather take my business to a broker who would do so, given the choice.

How about a third-party company that awards a free trip to a timeshare resort (some obligations apply) to every HP shareholder?

Correct. I have not studied securities law but I don't think Coinbase's users have any recourse claiming their BCC and Coinbase decides their stance is that it was always theirs as they held the relevant private keys.

This analogy doesn't work because people could've transferred their Bitcoin to a personal wallet while the same can't be said of stocks.

Actually... with many brokerages, you can still obtain actual paper stock certificates -- it's just that the overhead and fees to do that make it highly unattractive.

Furthermore: It is possible to directly transfer stocks from one brokerage account (similar to a wallet) to another at a different brokerage without having to liquidate assets.

In your example, it is like everyone who has EUR being entitled to 1:1 notes of a newly-created currency called lira, with owners simply entering their EUR notes' serial numbers and being credited the lira.

Your "forex brokerage" then decides they're "not going to mess with this newfangled currency", leaving you none the wiser with how they're handling the newly created funds if at all.

If it goes up, they could shrug and say that they had the serial numbers so it was theirs the whole time. If it crashes, they could credit everyone the decreased value of the lira out of money they made by selling off earlier and pocket the rest. (Or take option A and pocket all of it, if the 'good' PR is not worth the slightly decreased profits.)

Considering the prices people end up having gotten "locked-in" on after price fluctuations when using Coinbase, this wouldn't even be "far-fetched" for them so much as par for the course.

If you have pre-fork BTC on Coinbase, you have no way of capturing its value as BCC since you don't own the wallet.

You had a way to capture its value as BCC by withdrawing the BTC to your wallet - it's not a surprise, and it was communicated by Coinbase before the split.

I don't know if you have a historical example of that happening but it would most likely be illegal to accept lira but not EUR.

Illegal where? Perhaps inside the Eurozone but that wouldn't be enforceable anywhere else.

I don't have an actual historical example, it was more of a thought experiment.