This past Tuesday, at block 491,407, Bitcoin Gold (BTG) hard forked from the bitcoin chain. I first wrote about BTG here.
If you’re a holder of BTC then you should now have an equal amount of BTC and BTG.
Getting to those BTG may not be that easy, however.
Let’s check out the exchange support.
Coinbase is not supporting B2X. It’s not generally a good place to receive a hard forked coin anyways as you do not have control of your private keys. Coinbase is not supporting BTG as the code has not been released to the public for review. That may change in the future if Coinbase feels BTG is secure.
Bittrex will be crediting bitcoin holders with BTG but will not list BTG on the exchange. Like Coinbase, Bittrex notes the lack of code available for review and the fact BTG does not have replay protection.
Poloniex too is not supporting BTG for the same reasons mentioned above.
Then there’s the Gemini Exchange who says that BTG development is so early that they couldn’t technically support BTG even if they wanted to.
So where can you trade BTG? Bitfinex, HitBTC, and Binance are the largest three by volume to date.
And as you can see those that can sell are doing just that.
Hopefully you hold your BTC, and thus your BTG, in a wallet where you control the private keys.
If so you will be able to get to that BTG at some point.
What you’ll need is a wallet that supports BTG. Bitcoin Gold says that it will provide a list of verified wallets on its webpage, although none are listed yet.
Then you’ll also need a tool to extract the BTG. Wallet providers will enable these tools once they wrap their heads around Bitcoin Gold. And Bitcoin Gold plans to publish guides on those extraction tools on its webpage. Again, none are available to date.
As an example, I store my BTC in a Ledger hardware wallet. I’ll be keeping my eye on Ledger and at some point they’ll publish instruction on how to extract BTG. It’s very unlikely they’ll provide a BTG wallet due to the lack of replay protection.
Once the Ledger extraction tool is out then I’ll look for a BTG verified wallet and extract the BTG. Then I plan on selling on Binance.
Who knows what BTG will be worth by then… probably not much.
For more on cryptos follow me and on SteemFollower
Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin at Coinbase and mine with Genesis – use code jWxfye for 3% off