If you owned Bitcoin in a wallet you control prior to November 1st you own Bitcoin Gold (BTG). BTG is a pseudo-fork of the Bitcoin blockchain with Segwit. Unlike the Bitcoin Cash fork, the crypto supply of BTG has been manipulated by the developers and 100,000 BTG pre-mined for development costs. The main difference BTG has from Bitcoin is that the developers implemented the Equihash algorithm which makes it incompatible with existing ASIC Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash miners. This hash algorithm change is a significant enough "structural" difference that will make it difficult to gain adoption in the market place because it the is counter to the frictionless adoption ideas I presented in my post Bitcoin Cash will become the #1 Crypto. Unlike Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold cannot easy be dropped into a codebase as a Bitcoin replacement without changing the code... this increases adoption friction.
Bitcoin Gold's goal is an attempt to solve the problem of mining centralization. In my opinion this is solution looking for a problem. As you can see in the pie chart below, the highest percentage any pool has is 17.9%. There is healthy competition and compared to 2014 where some pools had routinely over 40% of the hashrate, the network is continuing to decentralize. ASICs continue to get cheaper and I would argue that it is easier for a newcomer to buy an ASIC and start mining then to have to assemble a mining rig and install software and optimize that software.
I do not think Bitcoin Gold will have any significant market share in the future and the price right now is overvalued @$177 (already down 40% from its futures contract highs since BTG started to flood the market today). BTG is overvalued because of the limited liquidity and few exchanges that support actual deposits. Right now there is an opportunity, HitBtc exchange has just enabled deposits of Bitcoin Gold. I see this as an opportunity to make a quick buck on something I feel that will not be valued as highly in the long term.
Here is how I sold my BTG today
Export your Bitcoin private keys from before the Bitcoin Gold fork on 1 November
Download the Coinomi mobile app.
Sign up for a HitBtc exchange account.
Transfer your Bitcoin to another address. THIS IS IMPORTANT!! This needs to be done to preserve security as you will be exposing your Bitcoin private key and making it a hot wallet.
In Coinomi add the Bitcoin Gold wallet by clicking "+Coin" in the sidebar.
Once in the Bitcoin Gold wallet, click the 3 vertical dots in the top right corner and select "Sweep Wallet."
Enter or scan your private key for the wallet you want to import.
Now your BTG coins should be showing in your BTG wallet. Just send them to the HitBTC exchange like you would do any Bitcoin transaction. Note: right now it seems to be taking around an hour to appear in the HitBtc exchange wallet.
Remember time is important and I fully expect that we will continue to see the price decrease as supply gets dumped on the market. As I outlined above BTG doesn't have any compelling adoption reasons that can sustain its current price point when you already have Dash, Monero, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash and solid competitors. The value proposition isn't really there.
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