The world of cryptocurrency allows us many opportunities to get free money as we've seen recently with the Bitcoin Cash hardfork. However, it's important to realise that there are pitfalls that need to be avoided in order to keep your coins safe.
Bitcoin Cash was successfully launched by a well organised team and now, 3 months later, the resulting currency has stabilized to what seems to be a fair value of around $325.
This is, however, not the case with Bitcoin Gold. The split, which occured yesterday has been fraught with issues, the most notable of which is the DDOS (denial of service) attack which brought down the BTG website.
If you look a little deeper into the problems however, you'll find that there are some glaring issues with Bitcoin Gold. Firstly it is rumoured the coins will be premined by the developers which seems to point at BTG being a scam from the start.
Most importantly though is that the coin launched with an incomplete codebase and the most important thing of all is that it lacks replay protection. Here is a brief description of the importance of replay protection.
Replay protection prevents a transaction on the Bitcoin Gold chain from being re-transmitted on the Bitcoin chain and vice versa. As Bitcoin Gold is a fork of Bitcoin, the transaction format, the signatures, etc. are the same. A transaction on one chain could be copied to the other chain and will be valid, possibly leading to unintended loss of coins.
In other words, if BTG does not have replay protection, spending on one chain will cause you to send the same amount of coins on the other chain. Even after the fork, spending BTC can lead to loss of BTG and vice versa.
Trezor (maker of hardware wallets)
https://blog.trezor.io/trezor-statement-on-bitcoin-gold-fork-78cebc0532c7
With this in mind, please be careful with your Bitcoins. Do not allow the promise of free money to jeopardize your crypto savings.
Thanks for reading
@deimus
I absolutely DO NOT TRUST THE DEV TEAM of Bitcoin Gold. There's several factors that are gonna keep me far away from those guys. I like, and trust, the guys over at Exodus.io, and they're not gonna support it, and I know several large exchanges don't wanna touch it either. It sure looks like a money-grab to me. I probably won't even grab my free Bitcoin Gold, as it'll mean sharing my private Bitcoin key with some wallet I'll never use again...EVER.
Thanks for your post, and you have a new follower (and upvote).
Well said. The Bitcoin Cash hardfork looks like a masterfully executed operation compared to this Bitcoin Gold flop. I don't know who would be stupid enough to trust this dev team, whose main coder is anonymous. There isn't even picture of the guy on the website. LOL
Additionally, these guys were offering BTG bounty to anyone willing to code the replay protection just a few days ahead of the fork date!! Amateur hour all the way.
"Flop," and "amateur hour," you said it all. All they've done is cause a slight hiccup in the system, but I took that as an opportunity to invest a little more into BTC last night, with more to follow soon!
It doesn't matter how risky it is, people just go crazy about booking profits , and except some everyone just trying to get whatever profit they can, even though thnx for this post to let people know what they r risking in hope of small return, 👍👌 I m new n started a while ago plz upvote and follow to help me grow | find me @singhrajat
Thanks for the warning @deimus - wow you certainly has to keep your wits about you
Glad to know that you are looking after our best interests @deimus
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