How to prepare for bitcoin gold fork

Bitcoin Gold is a branch of Bitcoin blockchain that took place on 25 October 2017 after Bitcoin reached Block 491407. It’s expected that from November 1, 2017, Bitcoin Gold miners would be able to start mining new blocks using a new Proof-Of-Work, (PoW) algorithm. The use of the Equihash algorithm is what necessitated the bifurcation of the Bitcoin blockchain. The process is referred as forking because both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold have an identical blockchain as from block 491407 going backward.

Jack Liao from China founded Bitcoin Gold; he works with five other individuals. This team of six members includes one anonymous individual only identified only as h4x3rotab from China, the Bitcoin Gold website has not provided any photo of this person. The anonymous person is designated as a Lead Developer of Bitcoin Gold. The other team members are Robert Kuhne from North America as the strategist, Alejandro Regojo from Spain as the Organizer, Martin Kuvandzhiev from Bulgaria as the Core Developer and Advisor, and last but not least, Franco Niebles from Colombia as the UI/UX Designer.

The creators of Bitcoin Gold believe that Bitcoin is no longer as decentralized as it should be, and they have designed Bitcoin Gold to decentralize mining and keep it that way. Presently, major mining rigs have hijacked the vision by Nakamoto where one CPU gets one vote. The majority of mining equipment is now in the hands of a few powerful companies and entities. Furthermore, some of the companies are suspected to be involved in an abusive process that threatens the integrity of the Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Bitcoin Gold creators have come up with an algorithm and software that prevents unfair mining practices against individuals who wish to participate in its mining. The software will prevent usage of specialized hardware such as ASIC that are expensive to acquire, and therefore used by well-funded entities to dominate Bitcoin mining. To achieve that goal, Bitcoin Gold creators used Equihash PoW algorithm in their mining software, instead of the SHA256 Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm.

Therefore, ASIC specialized mining equipment used in Bitcoin mining cannot mine Bitcoin Gold because they cannot run the ASIC algorithm. However, Graphical Processing Units (GPU) found in ordinary desktops and laptops can run the Equinosh algorithm. Meaning, anyone can start Bitcoin Gold mining using readily available consumer hardware. That will restore the decentralized mining environment that Satoshi envisioned when he conceptualized Bitcoin.

The transfer of value from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Gold will happen in a ratio of 1:1. That’s if you own 1 Bitcoin, you simply go to a platform that supports Bitcoin Gold and exchange it for one 1 Bitcoin Gold. To do that, you will need your Private Keys to prove you owned that 1 Bitcoin. However, you must retain exclusive control of your private keys while doing that transfer. As with other virtual currencies, you need to create a Bitcoin Gold wallet before you can start trading in Bitcoin Gold.

Several exchanges that you can use to trade in Bitcoin Gold presently and several others have promised to support Bitcoin Gold trading in the future. If you need to exchange your Bitcoins for Bitcoin Gold, you can use the following exchanges:

Those that have promised to support Bitcoin Gold in the future are:

The wallets listed below will allow you to create your virtual wallet and use it to receive and store your Bitcoin Gold private and public keys. They are easy to use and support Bitcoin Gold fully.

If you plan to start mining Bitcoin Gold, then you can do it from your PC at home, join a mining pool to start earning from your investment immediately. If you opt to join a mining pool, then you should consider the following pools listed on Bitcoin Gold’s website. They are:

Some of the major concerns raised by some virtual currency exchanges are that the Bitcoin Gold has not been released its code for review. However, the Bitcoin Gold team has since made the code available at GitHub repository and anybody can review it. The second major concern was that Bitcoin Gold does not have an inbuilt replay protection. The Bitcoin Gold team has responded that it has two implementations; PR1 and PR2. It’s working on both, and they are similar some ways, but they will need to be tested some more and perfected. It expects the two implementations to be complete by October 31, 2017.

The team has emphasized the importance of testing than coding to be able to identify any loopholes that coders may have overlooked during coding. Replay Protection will prevent malicious people taking another person’s Bitcoins and spending them during the transfer. That’s possible because when the fork happened, both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold had identical blocks. A malicious person could pick a private key used during a legit transaction and use it one on second virtual currency network. Therefore, at that point, any transaction that a Bitcoin network could approve, the Bitcoin Gold network could also approve it.

The Bitcoin Gold is an interesting development that has promised to make it possible for ordinary people to profit from mining without investing in expensive equipment. However, its developers are still working to prevent Replay Attacks. What’s important therefore is to invest cautiously or simply wait for the dust to settle. However, as with any investment, those who take the biggest risk are the biggest winners when it turns out they were right. The opposite is also true. Once all aspects of its coding and security are complete, we expect Bitcoin Gold to be a game changer in the way virtual currency mining is done and secured.