Striking Gold: As Bitcoin Gold Looms Closer, Questions Arise

The Bitcoin Gold project is straightforward about one thing: it will airdrop free coins for any Bitcoin owner. This is an algorithmic certainty, as the project will copy the whole transaction history of the original blockchain. But the promise of free money still leaves the cryptocurrency community baffled by inconsistencies.

Bitcoin Gold claims to be the ASIC-resistant implementation of Bitcoin, as the chain will use GPU mining instead of the high hash rate specialized machines. Because of this, the project will not affect the Bitcoin blockchain in any way, by attracting miners or mining pools away from the main blockchain or other ASIC-mined blockchains.

But experts have discovered several flaws with the project. One is that there is currently no test net, as it is usual for upcoming mining. Secondly, the Bitcoin Gold chain might start mining with a very high difficulty level, which would make the chain impracticable. There is also no Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) in the code, which means the blockchain will not roll back difficulty to match the hashing power. And Bitcoin Gold will come with some pre-mining kept for the team.

The new network is also not protected against replay attacks. The excuse from the project was that "there has only been one volunteer developer working on this project until now."

Despite the big claims and expectations, the Bitcoin Gold project lacks basic features that would mark a cryptocurrency as reliable and solid.

The official cutoff date for Bitcoin Gold is October 25, although the coin would be released on November 1. But some talk of a possible delay surfaced on the Slack channel. In November, exchanges also might start offering Bitcoin Gold, although for now the Bittrex exchange has declined a clear yes or no.

Currently, Bitcoin Gold lacks a ticker- the BCG symbol is taken, and a possible XBG may be used for trading. The official wallet is expected to be released about a month following the release, and no one knows what would happen to the price in the meantime, while not all users have access to coins.