The launch of Golos, Russian Steem fork, caused community to ask many questions. With less than a week before the launch, I want to share the most actual news about Golos.
Thanks to developers. They created a new tradition of daily community hangouts where any questions are welcomed and answered in a timely manner by Golos development team representative. Some of the records of such evening meetings are published on our separate channel “Evening with Golos”.
However, dialogues are in Russian and each meeting is about 1-2 hours long, so I decided to make a short report about Golos news. I will try to make it comprehensive for our English readers.
The most interesting news about Golos is that crowdsale starts on November 1 instead of October 15
Live hangout with Golos developers team
However, while technological aspects of blockchain and Golos client are practically ready, the marketing lags behind and lots of advertising materials still lacking. Without proper marketing, crowdsale will unlikely be successful.
Success criterion is attracting at least 1000 crowdsale participants. This is impossible without good marketing. In this scenario, developers lean to the decision to postpone crowdsale launch for 2 weeks. This time will be enough to prepare and polish marketing campaign that will advertise Golos in the outside world.
Additionally, holding back crowdsale will allow the team to effectively use offline events during this autumn. November 10 is the day of the Second Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Russia in Moscow. If crowdsale will be launched on October 15, this huge conference will be meaningless.
The decision is not yet official, but the whole community stands behind the developers on this matter. I believe that crowdsale will not be launched before November 1.
Golos Network will be launched as planned on October 15, but you will be able to buy crowdsale tokens only after November 1. Due to this shift, the dates sharedrops and first cashouts will be also shifted accordignly.
What happens during the launch of the network
The network will be launched with all accounts that were in the snapshot of Steem network (terms of the snapshot were described by the developers multiple times, you can read about them here).
We talk about 8374 accounts. All these accounts will be registered with the minimal balance. All accounts will have at least something on their balances. We do not know the exact sum, but it should be enough to start working within the network right away. All people who were captured by the snapshot will be able to continue blogging, commenting, and upvoting regardless of whether they participated in the crowdsale.
Note that just like during the launch of Steem, the first cashout will happen two months after the launch (approximately, in the beginning of January). Before that, accounts will accumulate funds received from posting.
Adding funds to accounts from the snapshot after the crowdsale
The crowdsale will start on November 1, 2016. The duration of the crowdsale will be 30 days or less in case maximum investments ($3 million) will be raised earlier.
By the end of the crowdsale, in addition to those who bought “Golos Power” for bitcoins, all accounts captured by the snapshot will be credited. How much you will receive is an open information that you can look up now. Find your account in the file and check how much funds will be transferred to your account. If you need more, make sure to buy some during the crowdsale.
The math is simple: for each 1000 of (Steem Power + STEEM) you will receive about 16 Golos Power.
What to do if you are not in the snapshot, but you believe that you must be there?
Yesterday, during the evening meeting, 
Such accounts will not cause the overhaul of the snapshot taken on September 29, but those who think that they deserve to be in the snapshot and wants to be a part of the Golos network right after the launch should write to PR-manager of the network 
Golos Tokens and Exchanges
Golos tokens will be tradeable. As of right now, we have good news: partnerships solidified with two exchanges – Ukranian Kuna Exchange and Coinessa.
Obviously, these are relatively small local exchanges and they are far from being comparable to giants like Bittrex or Poloniex. However, right from the start for the network you will have options to deposit and withdraw funds from Golos.
Closer to the end of the crowdsale we can expect more partnerships with bigger exchanges. One of the best candidates for this is our local exchange LiveCoin.
To sum up, we can be certain that Golos Tokens will have at least some liquidity immediately after the launch.
Russian Tags
Yes, Russian tags will be available right after the launch. This feature is already implemented. The interesting thing is that in order to implement Russian tagging the developers did not modify STEEM blockchain code. The functionality was simply moved to the website of Golos. These tags are transliterated and formatted in order to be included in Golos blockchain.
Note that Russian tags work only if you publish posts on the official Golos website, not when you post them directly in blockchain. The vast majority of users will never notice this change. However, the developers of web applications will be able to implement analogue tag parsing in their apps. Use my link to the GitHub of the developers.
Referral program
There are no plans for such a program right after the launch, but it may be implemented in the nearest future.
It will work just as any other referral program. You will passively earn a small percentage of the income that your referrals generate.
The implementation of the program will require some modifications of the STEEM source code, but the developers plan to implement it in a timely fashion.
A couple of words about PoW Golos mining
There were several occasions when various people asked about PoW Golos mining. Some were concerned that this process will be monopolized just like it happened in STEEM (please, refer to the screenshot).
STEEM PoW mining monopolization, 06.10.2016
In general, PoW blocks share is about 1/21 of the overall amount of mined tokens (about 20 are mined by delegates). This is a fairly small share and even the total monopolization of PoW mining does not look like a serious menace, but we are glad to know that the developers of Golos pay attention to the smallest parts of their project.