After the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in August 2017, the next big topic of discussion in the cryptocurrency community, surely is the new upcoming hard fork “Bitcoin Gold” scheduled on 25th October.
Almost everyone in the cryptocurrency community have been selling their altcoins to accumulate as many bitcoins as possible before the hard fork – so that they can get “free Bitcoin Gold” just like they got free bitcoin cash.
I, too, was planning to do the same.
But, is it really a good idea?
Lately, there have been lots of talks about bitcoin gold being a scam. Many rumors stated the folk has already been performed.
At first, I thought they were just some random rumours.
In order to satisfy my inner curiosity, I decided to do some research on it. So, I went to their official website to get more knowledge about the project.
I was surprised. There was nothing to be found on the website except for a logo, the date and some social media links. No other information at all.
That’s when I realised something was fishy.
I dug in deeper and I found this reddit post which confirmed that it was a scam.
Let’s have a look at some of the facts here.
Firstly, in order to “claim” your bitcoin gold, you need to submit your private key – you heard it right, they ask for your private key – on their website https://www.claimbtcgpu.org
Obviously, you don’t need to “claim” your BTG in this kind of sense.
Also, no sane person will ever show his/her private key to anyone. DO NOT share your private key. It’s like giving away your house keys to some random guy. They will be able to enter / leave at will, and will be able to do whatever they want with the stuff inside.
Except for the bad English, their claim website looks legit, at first glance at least – thus amateurs might easily believe it and get scammed.
But trust me, the only thing you’re gonna get is a BIG FAT ZERO in your BTC wallet if you share your private key with anyone.
Next, when I came across this post, I found out that there was supposed to be an ICO for BTG. I don’t know much about it but considering that hardly anyone knows about the ICO – it was a failure.
You can get some more info about the ICO here and here.
Most probably, after the failure of the ICO, and the success of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, they might’ve decided to imitate Bitcoin cash hard fork in order to make some quick bucks. Thus, the Bitcoin gold hard fork.
By using a wayback machine, you can see how different their website looked on August 31 here.
According to the snapshots:
“BTCGPU will create 16000 blocks after forked from No 478558th Block.
every block 12.5 BTG.”
But, at the time of writing this article, we are currently on the 489175th block for BTC right now.
Does this mean the fork has already happened?
Most probably.
And now they are in the process of adding a pre-mine of 16,000 blocks to the end of the chain (200,000 bitcoin gold in total).
Either that or maybe they might have changed the block number for the fork. Who knows? There’s no info on the site to confirm anything.
They can just buy / sell to themselves and create an artificial pump. As soon as people will start joining the pump rally for BTG they will dump their premined coins (around 200,000 BTG) and you will be stuck with some worthless coins.
Maybe that’s why they might have hidden the information about the ico and the premined 16000 blocks.
Also, the Equihash POW algorithm that they’ve adopted is incomplete. (WTF! There’s hardly 2 weeks left before the fork)
There are very little comments on the code itself.
Also, they do not have a testnet of the network created, so the miners can’t even test the system and unlike Bitcoin Cash, the BTG project still implements the same per-block difficulty adjustment as bitcoin (BTC) in its code. No change of difficulty algorithm has been implemented.
Lastly, they haven’t even implemented the replay protection yet. This is a major setback.
For those of you who do not know why it is important, without replay protection, there is a chance of you losing your Bitcoins if you try to sell or transfer your airdropped bitcoin gold.
Also, without replay protection, no big exchange will ever list it, and the wallets won’t support it.
Thus, even if this project is legit and not a scam, I highly doubt bitcoin gold will have any real value. Assuming it did get some value initially due to the hype, the developers, in order to make some quick bucks, will dump their premined coins ASAP, and you will be left only with some worthless coins.
Thus, I would highly recommend you stay away from BTG as much as possible. Majority of the people are selling altcoins (at a loss) and moving into bitcoins to gain some free bucks (BTG), thus reducing the altcoin prices.
As soon as the fork news will settle down, these same people will try to rush back into the altcoins (at higher prices) due to FOMO as the altcoin prices start spiking up. (IKR! How stupid can people be)
I suggest you act smart. While everyone is selling their altcoins at losses, you accumulate as much as possible at these dirt-cheap prices to reap some great gains in the upcoming month.