Bitcoin Gold Sets Weekend Date for Launch

Published on 10 November 2017 by Cryptovest Staff

In what was music to the ears of miners and users, the team behind Bitcoin Gold announced that its launch will be this weekend on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., or 19:00 (UTC).

The launch had originally been set for Nov. 1.

In ablog post, it was noted that wallets and exchanges will be able to process deposits, withdrawals and trades as soon as they are ready.

“This is the culmination of months of hard work, which have led to many changes and improvements.”

According to the blog post, these changes and improvements include:

  • Implementation of full Replay Protection (BIP143 SIGHASH): protecting the community from attacks
  • Implementation of a Unique “G” and “A” prefixed Address Format: avoiding accidental coin transactions to incorrect destinations
  • Refinement of the per-block difficulty adjustment algorithm: to better respond to dynamic changes in hashing power
  • The usual minor tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements
  • Successful mining on several generations of Public Testnet
  • Network & pool integration

Following the launch, team members said they will provide the Bitcoin Gold full node client download on its website.

The BTG blockchain will officially be live, with blocks mined openly by users and pools from all around the world.

Shouts out

In announcing the launch date, Bitcoin Gold took care to thank the Bitcoin community. This included those who’ve been contributing hash power to its testnets.

“…besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the Bitcoin Gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time.”

The fork

These ‘thank you’ comments may or may not do anything to smooth over some of the hard feelings many in the crypto world have about Bitcoin Gold.

We told you how when Bitcoin Gold forked last month, but did not launch, there was much left to be desired.

Many frowned upon the Bitcoin Gold team’s decision to mine its coins before it actually launched. The concern is that such a move can lead to a centralization of funds before that actual launch date.

Discontent mounted on the Slack channel over the team deciding to pre-mine 100,000 Bitcoin Gold coins. Soon after that, a DDOS attack was launched against the site, which the team admitted was not protected well enough.

So we’ll see how the launch goes, and report to you what happens.