With the upcoming Bitcoin gold fork 25th Oct 2017 there has been a lot of questions and unrest about what will happen.
I have done a lot of research and have noticed a few issues with its implementation.
Obviously the upside is the more Bitcoin you own the more Bitcoin gold you will get for free.
You need to hold your Bitcoin in an offline wallet and possess you personal key to claim your gold.
No need to claim straight away but over the following days after the fork you can claim your gold.
The issues that I have noticed are as follows:
- There seems to be a whole heap of domains registered under the same email (not same IP) in their whois. Most of these look pretty dodgy.
- It looks like they have tried running several ICOs from the looks of their domain lists.
- There has been some Bitcoin gold premined and offered previously as an ICO.
- Unfinished pow implementation.
- Replay protection not implemented, without this being implemented the big exchanges wont list it to be traded, no wallets will support it and you might even lose your gold if you try to transfer or sell your airdropped Bitcoin gold.
- No change of difficulty algorithm implemented (they will compete with other GPU-mined coin for hashpower)
- Without the difficulty fix alone, this coin will crater rapidly.
- The code is unfinished so no-one can seriously review it yet, and there's no commitment for a testnet definition yet.
- Using the wayback machine (website that takes snapshots of any website on a past date) on date 31st Aug 2017 it looks like the developers intended to run an ICO with 16000 pre-mined blocks worth approx 200,000 bitcoin gold.
- The developers are trying to hide all this information from the general public.
- They specified different dates 3 times, once in their github page (11th October, and the block ended up being mined at 28th September) and a third time as 25th of October.
There are a few possible outcomes that can happen when the fork comes out and people receive the gold:
- sell it off and buy more Bitcoin with it increasing the value of Bitcoin.
- keep both for the long run keeping the value steady of Bitcoin.
- sell off both the gold and the bitcoin they bought to get the gold and reinvest in alt coins dropping the value of Bitcoin and raising the value of other alt coins.
- it wont be adopted by any exchange due to the unfinished nature of the project and be worthless
There are a number of other scenarios but even if the value of bitcoin drops during a sell off it will more than likely recover pretty quickly so you are pretty safe with your holdings.
Who knows it might all work out and be legit and they might miraculously pull it all together before 25th Oct 2017 but I know I will be staying away from this but i will watch for a Bitcoin sell off following the fork to snap up some cheap Bitcoin.
So what do you think? I would love to hear your opinions on the subject and any other information you may know that i have missed.