One month until #bgold exodus fork.
Hodl BTC on 10.25 get free BTG on 11.1#bgold1025#blockchainQE #bitcoin
Hodl BTC on 10.25 get free BTG on 11.1#bgold1025#blockchainQE #bitcoin
On Monday November 20, the cryptocurrency-based hardware wallet manufacturer, Satoshi Labs, revealed that the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) network is now accessible through the Trezor beta wallet. Further, the BTG development team has recently revealed that the wallet “mybtgwallet” may be a scam, alongside information on the team’s premine endowment process.
Trezor Adds Bitcoin Gold Support
The forked cryptocurrency bitcoin gold is having an interesting week as market liquidity is starting to hit exchanges. BTG markets have increased 100 percent in the past 24 hours jumping from $150 per token to $275 on November 21. The day before the Prague-based Satoshi Labs, the makers of Trezor, revealed they would enable BTG retrieval for customers within the wallet’s beta client. Trezor’s blog gives a step-by-step process on BTG claiming, just as it did when bitcoin cash forked this past August. Users are required to use the firm’s beta wallet and upgrade their firmware to 1.6.0.
“For the time being, your Bitcoin Gold wallet will only be accessible from the Trezor beta Wallet,” explains the company.
Bitcoin Gold is not Bitcoin — It merely uses bitcoin’s history similarly to the case of Bitcoin Cash — This process will not affect your Bitcoin wallet at all.
Removing an Alleged Fraudulent Wallet from the BTG Homepage
In addition to getting BTG support from Satoshi Labs this week, the development team has revealed a wallet called “mybtgwallet” may be fraudulent and removed the wallet from their homepage. The development team says they are investigating the situation and the team is working with security experts covering the issue.
“When we receive verifiable reports that a website or app is a problem, we removed it from our site,” explains the BTG development team.
Preliminary investigations indicated that at least some of the claims of theft by the mybtgwallet site are reliable — Like all third-party sites, that site was not in our control, but we immediately removed it from our pages and the team is working with security experts to get to the bottom of this issue — It appears the mybtgwallet online wallet site was modified by unknown parties long after it was originally published.
BTG Developers: “The ‘Premine’ Wasn’t a Premine”
Lastly, the BTG development team has also addressedthe controversial bitcoin gold premine this week. The founding developers say that the premine is not like traditional instamine processes that most teams utilize and that it shouldn’t even be considered a ‘premine.’ The “premine” wasn’t a pre-mine,” says the BTG team.
Bitcoin gold was replicated from the bitcoin (BTC) blockchain at block height 491407, and at that point there were 16.5M BTG in existence, explains the organization.
“After this, the project mined 100,000 coins (8000 blocks at 12.5 coins per bock), so it’s more of a post-mine, but we still call it a premine,” reveals the BTG endowment announcement.
A true premine is when the makers of coin start a new blockchain with a genesis block and do private mining to accumulate a number of coins, and only then make mining public for others earn coin rewards. With that approach, the makers obviously start out with a huge proportion of the initial coin supply – 100%! That would have been a serious problem.
In addition to describing what they believe is a ‘fair premine,’ the BTG team claims 95 percent of the coins are locked up in an endowment. Some (35%) will possibly be available for use immediately, and 60% was locked up for the future. The core development team has gathered 5% of the BTG premine to cover initial infrastructure costs.
After a bumpy roll-out and widespread criticism regarding the project’s supposed secrecy, Bitcoin Gold’s development team has taken to daily updates in an effort to help push the project along.
Bitcoin Gold Reveals Daily Update Blog
In an attempt to shed more light on a project many consider to be lacking in detail, the development team announced a campaign of daily updates. Replay Protection Fully Implemented is the first installment.
“In order to ensure the safety of the Bitcoin ecosystem,” the statement began, “Bitcoin Gold has implemented full replay protection, an essential feature that protects users’ coins from being spent unintentionally.”
One concern during a hard fork, is that of transactions being accepted along both chains, causing confusion and, in some cases, outright fraud.
To answer those worries, Bitcoin Gold “has just implemented a solution called SIGHASH_FORK_ID replay protection,” the update continues. “It is an effective two-way replay protection mechanism that enforces a new algorithm to calculate the hash of a transaction so that all new Bitcoin transactions will be invalid on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain and vice versa.”
The update then points to a Github link for greater detail.
“This makes replaying transactions impossible,” the team claims.”Replay protection is a safety feature that makes sure that transactions on one chain are invalid on the other chain, thus preventing transaction replay and the possible resulting loss of funds,” they reiterate.
Next Steps
The team asserts mainnet deployment will happen after services such as an official mining guide, blockchain explorer, web forum, and wallet guide are offered.
Immediate next steps include: “Launch public testnet [notification through Slack]; Adjust network parameters; Prepare for mainnet launch; Deploy mainnet; Electrum fork; 3rd party Wallets and Exchanges integration; Decentralized mining,” though no dates were given and no timetable was suggested.
The post then concludes with a mission-statement of sorts, guiding principles under which the team is set to operate.
“Bitcoin Gold is a community-led project to create a hard fork of Bitcoin to a new proof-of-work algorithm to make Bitcoin mining decentralized again,” they state. “Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for countless new people around the world to participate in the mining process,” the team declares. Time will tell.
The price of bitcoin cash (BCH) has been on a tear lately as network participants are steadily preparing for the upcoming hard fork. At the time of writing, the digital asset’s value is averaging $495 USD and currently commands the second highest cryptocurrency trade volume in the world.
Bitcoin Cash Markets
Over the past week, BCH markets have been pushing quite a bit of trade volume as the price has jumped above its long-standing $300 price range. Now with $879M in global trade volume stemming from exchanges like Bithumb, Hitbtc, and Bitfinex the price spike had surpassed $500 per BCH on November 1.
Korean markets are taking the lion’s share of BCH volume as the South Korean won is capturing 57 percent of the market volume. Additionally, the price rise is taking place just before digital asset’s upcoming hard fork centered around fixing the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA).
On October 31, the Bitcoin ABC development team released its 0.16 source code which is hard fork ready for November 13th, 2017 at 2:06 PM GMT.
Technical Indicators
According to the one week chart, bitcoin cash markets have been experiencing a nice rally by capitalizing an upswing of 25 percent over the past three days. At the moment order books on Bitfinex and other popular exchanges show a solid foundation within the $375-450 range if bears drag the price down.
However, markets look bullish as charts show the 100 Simple Moving Average is well above the 200 SMA which indicates markets could spike again after some consolidation.
Looking at the 24-hour charts show the RSI is heading north, but the Stochastic oscillator shows overbought conditions which could mean bulls are just rearranging positions. If buyers push pressure higher ranges between $550-700 are obtainable, but traders will likely meet resistance between the two price points. Daily charts show BCH markets have climbed 15 percent during the end of October 31st into November 1st.
Bitcoin Cash News & Community Sentiment
Of course, bitcoin cash supporters are quite pleased with the price, and many traders believe it will continue to rise steadily. The reason for this is, there are a lot of people who think BCH might be a safeguard against the possibility that the upcoming Segwit2x fork may get messy. As the fork gets closer, the price has continued to head north gathering significant trade volume across global exchanges. Further, the BCH community seems pleased with the November 13 fork scheduled for the network which aims to fix the current DAA.
In other BCH news the well known online merchant, Wikileaks Shop, has just announced to its Twitter followers it will accept BCH for Wikileaks merchandise. “Do you have bitcoin cash? You can now use it in our shop to support Wikileaks,” explains the store’s administrators. Another positive announcement this week came from the company Bitcoin Plug ATM, which plans to implement BCH in the firm’s Los Angeles-based automated teller machines (ATM).
“We are excited to soon offer Bitcoin Cash at all of our Los Angeles BATM locations — Thank you General Bytes,” the ATM company details.
The Verdict
Overall BCH proponents are optimistic about the currency’s market value and hard fork going forward. A good majority of BCH enthusiasts, and the network’s developers believe the fork will be smooth and without issue. Further, every week new infrastructure and BCH support has been steadily growing which has built a solid foundation for this nascent network. Over the next two weeks with the Segwit2x drama taking place people in BCH should be well positioned.
Bear Scenario: If BCH markets start to correct there should be a temporary floor within the $425-450 price territory. Further dips could bring the price to $375 where traders will find yet another foundation of support. Key levels to watch will be if BCH breaks the $475 and $400 zones which may lead to an additional sell-off.
Bull Scenario: At the moment bulls have the reigns going forward as order books show there are just a few obstacles before smooth sailing upwards. Fibonacci trend lines at a 61.8 extension (golden ratio) show prices could reach $700 in the short term with some resistance in between. With enough buying pressure from that vantage point, bitcoin cash could touch all-time highs once again over the next few weeks.
From $0 to $2,900 – and seemingly everywhere in between.
Bitcoin gold, a new fork of the bitcoin software, may not have been officially launched (or distributed to users), but that isn't stopping the cryptocurrency markets from seeking to determine its potential value (or profiting from its eventual existence).
In an interesting twist on a typical distribution, a number of exchanges are now listing a token that represents a claim on the future delivery of bitcoin gold (in advance of it becoming available to all bitcoin users). Ahead of that event, however, traders are seeking to value the asset, which proposes an alternative to the difficulty of competing for rewards on bitcoin's mining network.
Still, it's safe to say there's disagreement so far.
In interview, analysts expressed a reservation about bitcoin gold, both when speaking about its developer team, and when characterizing the protocol's potential market opportunity.
Safiri Felix, a researcher at financial publisher Empiricus, for example, believes that while bitcoin gold is likely to encourage others to clone bitcoin's blockchain, and thus capitalize on the potential to appeal to its expansive user base, he sees this trajectory as limited.
Felix told our source:
Indeed, most industry observers surveyed don't expect the project to compete with bitcoin or bitcoin cash, predicting its market capitalization would likely be similar to less valuable networks.
This belief seems reflected on exchanges, where BTG tokens traded for a high of $2,900 on Bitfinex, before dropping 96.64 percent to $97 on Tuesday. By Wednesday, prices stabilized around $137 at press time, though order books are heavy with sell orders in available markets.
At current prices, the value of all bitcoin gold (once released) would be worth a mere 43 percent of BCH and 2 percent of BTC. As such, it seems unlikely to surpass the value of those currencies in the immediate future.
Likewise, exchange interest also seems subdued. Currently, only a handful of exchanges, Bitfinex, HitBTC, Yobit, Bleutrade, Bitstar and Coinnest, support BTG/BTC and BTG/USD trading pairs.
Developer concerns
Of course, the biggest question mark for those surveyed was whether the tokens will actually be delivered by those behind the project.
Already controversial is that the team behind bitcoin gold intends to set aside a certain amount of the cryptocurrency to fund its future development, as part of what's called a "pre-mine." Indeed, Safiri was quick to note that the bitcoin gold team has no existing track record in the industry.
"It's natural to dismiss their ability to deliver quality code," he said.
Long-time industry entrepreneur and director of business and community at cryptocurrency wallet provider Jaxx, Charlie Shrem, also cited the decision to set aside funds as a suspicious one, though not one that inherently denotes any wrongdoing.
"[It] seems like an attempt to replicate bitcoin cash and give the developers a nice premine," he said.
Overall, his remarks pointed to the idea that the low price of bitcoin gold as compared to bitcoin and bitcoin cash may be reflective of the possibility the funds never actually arrive.
Long-term potential
As for what that means for those considering how to handle their holdings, it's worth noting that such market shifts are common when it comes to the price determination of a new asset.
For instance, bitcoin cash (BCH) – which forked off bitcoin in August – traded for highs of nearly $1,000 before dropping to trade between $300 to $400 in its first month. Likewise, at points, zcash traded for millions of dollars per token (though that was due to issues with its distribution).
But, it's still the question of the protocol's ultimate value proposition that seems most pertinent.
Shrem went so far as to forecast that its possible bitcoin gold could inspire cryptocurrency hobbyists to begin securing the protocol with older mining equipment, and that this could possibly jumpstart value creation, potentially leading to utility.
He noted that while older GPUs could be used to mine ether – the cryptocurrency of the ethereum network – doing so would mean a reduced chance of rewards given its existing competition.
Of course, others were more outright dismissive. Tim Enneking, managing director at hedge fund Crypto Asset Management, believes bitcoin gold proves fork currencies will likely have diminishing returns from here on out.
Enneking concluded:
Source
CoinDesk
It has been only 9 weeks since the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, and we are again discussing another Bitcoin hard fork. So for those of you who aren’t aware of the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork, pay attention.
In this article, I intend to cover everything you need to know about the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork and how to prepare and benefit from it by doubling you coin holdings.
Wowowow… double!!
Some of you may think this is a good thing as your value will also double!
Note: Doubling of coins does not mean doubling of value, because after a hard fork, the value of both versions of coins are determined based on user sentiments and demand/supply in the market.
So keeping that point in mind, let’s get started…
New Bitcoin Fork – Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
Bitcoin Gold is a new, would be cryptocurrency denoted, as of now, as BTG or “bgold”. It will be a fork of the original Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto invented in 2008.
The Bitcoin Gold community defines BTG in the following fashion:
Bitcoin Gold is a community-activated hard fork of Bitcoin to make mining decentralized again.
At present, there is very little information available about the technical know-how of this fork because their website is under development.
Who Is Doing This Fork And When Is It Happening?
The Bitcoin Gold project is being driven by some developers, miners, and their head Jack Liao, the CEO of the Hong Kong-based mining equipment manufacturing company, LightningAsic.
Bitcoin Gold’s lead developer is someone anonymous by the name of h4x3rotab and he/she claims that:
Bitcoin Gold is also a real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades.
As per their official website, the exact time is not yet known for this fork. But the official date for the fork is mentioned as 2017-10-25 (25th October 2017).
Why Is It Happening?
This is a community-driven hard fork without any consensus voting. It is primarily being driven by a few who believe that the original Bitcoin mining system has become centralized and is monopolized by a handful of mining companies.
They believe this because of ASIC miners which provide a very strong entry barrier for an average user or miner like you and me.
And now, these hard fork supporters want to change that and make the process more decentralized.
As per their Twitter:
How Do BTG Supporters Want To Change This Centralization Problem?
BTG (i.e. Bitcoin Gold) advocates have decided to solve this problem by forking Bitcoin on 25th October by changing its original protocol.
Specifically, to combat the mining centralization problem, the BTG developers are implementing a different mining algorithm altogether that will be resistant to ASIC chips called Equihash.
This will make ASIC miners irrelevant for mining Bitcoin Gold because, with the implementation of Equihash, Bitcoin Gold will be mineable simply by using cheap GPUs.
Note: Currently, Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 mining algorithm (read about SHA-256).
What’s Their Other Agenda?
Their other agenda is to save Bitcoin in case something happens to it in the future, as they claim will.
Also, I think they want to compete with other GPU minable cryptocurrencies like Zcash, Ethereum, and Monero.
And with Ethereum moving to POS consensus, this is a kind of masterstroke for this Bitcoin-branded coin (BTG) because then those Ethereum mining people will have to switch to either BTG or Zcash or another GPU minable currency in the future.
But they know that they are not competing with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as stated by their lead developer in a conversation with Bitcoin.com.
Features of Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
Bitcoin Gold doesn’t bring many features with it, but…
- BTG will be based on Equihash so it will be GPU minable.
- BTG will have inbuilt replay protection because it is a direct fork of BTC.
- BTG will have a variable difficulty that will change per block. (Good thing for GPU miners.)
- And looks like BTG will have a pool of pre-mined coins for 16,000 blocks.
Apart from these, there will be no changes like block size adjustment.
And BTG will be following the suit of the original BTC core developers for the future betterment of their coin because they believe that’s the secure way.
My Opinion
I have mixed feelings toward this because of several reasons…
It’s a good idea to have a GPU-minable algorithm. This will surely prevent centralization and currently there is no GPU-minable Bitcoin hard fork. So it’s good in that sense.
On the other hand, their development and way forward look depressing. There is literally no information whatsoever on their GitHub or official website. Moreover, on GitHub, none of their developers are publically available.
Also, haywire information sources on the Bitcointalk forum raise massive red flags about their future and their intentions. I was really surprised to learn that they might have an ICO for these pre-mined blocks, but again, there is little clarity about it on their official website.
But… let’s say that on 25th October they have beaten all odds, clarified the much-needed information about their project, and we have a fork… then what to do in that case?
Then the only thing to do is enjoy and claim your free airdropped Bitcoin Gold coins!
Confession: I am going sell some part of BTG immediately (if a fork happens) and will HODL the rest of it.
How To Get Free BTG
After the BTG fork, you need not do much, but you need to be updated and agile about this subject.
If you want access to your BTG coins, you need to take care of two things:
- You should have your private keys.
- You should avoid being replay attacked.
And here’s the important part: Both of your coins (BTC and BTG) will have the same private keys.
Moreover, due to this fork/split, another problem called Replay Attacks can happen.
Though, they say that they have replay protection in place, but we are not sure how effective it is as it has not been tested live.
So to avoid replay attacks and access your free BTG coins, we suggest you take care of the following things:
- Avoid transactions for some days until the dust settles to avoid replay attacks.
- Keep your Bitcoin private keys with you, not in a third party exchange like Coinbase.
- Use hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S and Trezor. Last time, during the Bitcoin Cash fork, these two hardware wallets were the first to support the forked coin.
- If you don’t have a hardware wallet, use software wallets like Mycelium, Jaxx, Coinomi, and Exodus to control your private keys.
- You can also use a paper wallet or brain wallet.
- If you hold your keys in a paper wallet or software wallet, wait for instructions on how to access your BTG coins.
Future Of BTG
The future of BTG isn’t clear yet. But if the fork happens, BTG will likely have some market value and will definitely steal away some hash power from GPU miners.
On the other hand, we really need exchanges and wallets to support this Bitcoin Gold fork; otherwise, it will have a hard time finding any value.
And as the fork time approaches, I will keep updating this article will more information on Bitcoin Gold and which wallets/exchanges are actually supporting it.
Last but not least, don’t fall prey to fake websites/wallets demanding your private keys to let you access your BTG.
So until that time, stay tuned as we keep up with the Bitcoin revolution!
Source
Coinsutra
Debate is a central part of the cryptocurrency community at large. Open forums such as Bitcoin.com have fostered mostly healthy fork debate about Bitcoin’s future. It appears at least one participant wished to stifle debate, and in a horrible way.
Fork Debate Turns Ugly and Dangerous
Online forums were bursting with outrage over a new low in the fork controversy popularly known as Segwit2x or the scaling debate.
“They essentially tried to get him or his family killed, only takes a simple mistake and [you’re] dead, happens regularly with [SWAT]. Essentially attempted murder, IMO. Whoever did that to him you are scum of the earth,” one poster characterized the event.
Another commenter on a rival forum added “this is dangerous and a very low move,” while yet another agreed and stated plainly, “Anyone who supports [either side in the fork debate] should absolutely condemn such tactics.”
Monday around 9 in the morning, Durham, North Carolina police were dispatched to Jameson Lopp’s house in an effort to address a hostage situation.
The caller’s voice was obviously disguised, saying someone had already been shot fifteen times in the house, and that the caller was holding hostages.
Explosives, the call claimed, were at the home’s door. The caller demanded something like a ransom, threatening “If I see any police coming toward the front door who aren’t handling a bag full of money, I’ll shoot them on sight.”
“By my voice, you can tell I’m not in a mental health state,” the caller claimed.
Emergency medical services, mobile command, and bulletproof vested police cordoned off Mr. Lopp’s neighborhood.
As police surrounded his home, Mr. Lopp apprised authorities of the real situation.
“I am not intimidated by this,” Jameson Lopp, Bitgo engineer and vocal Twitter personality in the fork conversation, stared into the camera defiantly. “This is actually, from my perspective, evidence that the people who want to do this do not have the guts to say anything to my face. They don’t have the guts to come here and actually tell me what their problem is with me.”
A Sad History, Unfortunately
There’s no doubt some in the niche debate will use Mr. Lopp’s experience to score political points.
The truth is far more nuanced, as prominent bitcoiners are targeted for extortion regardless of their opinions. Perhaps the best-known, and saddest, case involved that of the then-dying Hal Finney, an icon in the Bitcoin community long rumored to have been behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym.
Mr. Finney, who at the time suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was completely dependent on his wife, was the victim of a similar extortion attempt involving false reports to police. It went on for a year, and some even believe it continues to the present day in various forms against family who survives him.
Surely cryptocurrency advocates on either side of the fork debate do not need any more popular media associations with violence nor criminality.
As the latest hard fork nears, estimates put the triggering block height 494,784 to occur around mid-November, it’s important discussions remain uncensored and within bounds of basic civility.
To the community’s credit, all sides have come to Jameson Lopp’s defense.
Considering the nonsense above, should the bitcoin community be proud of its united defense of Jameson Lopp? Tell us in the comments below!
Images courtesy of: CSOR, Wired, Twitter, Durham PD.
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