In a devastating breach of trust, the Bitcoin Gold team has officially confirmed they’ve been pre-mining BTG for some time now ahead of the coming BTG “fork.” This ugly revelation could sink the BTG project before it ever even had a chance to start. Also read: More and more red flags are appearing for Bitcoin Gold (BTG) In a bombshell revelation, a Bitcoin Gold developer using the GitHub moniker “” confirmed the pre-mining of Bitcoin Gold in a Slack conversation regarding the veracity of swirling pre-mining rumors. This admission counters previous assertions by the BTG team that Bitcoin Gold would not be pre-mined, a development that greatly decreases the value—and trustworthiness—of the project.

BTG, a seemingly promising effort to decentralize mining by allowing GPU mining, is now facing a scandal of doomful proportions. Indeed, many pundits in the crypto space are saying this latest breach of trust is enough to destroy the Bitcoin Gold project permanently. So it looks like this is a private fork of bitcoin, with a private,hidden premine and after the premine was successful, it's released public — supr nova (@SuprnovaPools) Twitter user was the first person to make h4x3rotab’s damning Slack conversation available to the general public. In @SuprnovaPools’ snapshot, h4x3rotab’s admission is clear: “Yes, we will have a premine. The amount is not finalized but you can assume it should be less than 1% of the total supply.” To this end, some have come to the conclusion that the Bitcoin Gold developers have already pre-mined over 200,000 BTG coins.

Nov 16, 2017 - We are shutting down BTG Pool for good. We have lost too much money time and resources on this project. You can come mine more profitable and coins with us that actually work. Chapter closed. — MinerTopia (@MinerTopia) November 15, 2017. Right after Bitcoin Gold's hard fork, the project's website. Bitcoin Gold is a Hard Fork that allows you to mine Bitcoin with GPU. BTG implements a new PoW algorithm, Equihash, that makes mining decentralized again.

Not only is this pre-mining extremely deceitful, then, but it also means the Bitcoin Gold team can all but dump their pre-mined coins on exchanges post-November 1st. First, they said premine, then No Premine, Now back to Premine, LOL and snapshot time gap only guarantees the premine will happen, — gonzobreakout (@gonzobreakout) Coinbase, Bittrex Refuse to Support BTG Two of the world’s most dominant crypto exchanges—Coinbase and Bittrex—have officially come out against supporting the Bitcoin Gold fork. Coinbase is standing their ground as the BTG devs refuse to release the BTG code, which is a huge “” for Coinbase’s compliance officers. Bittrex—the 3rd largest exchange in the world—is: “At this time, the information and codebase presented by the Bitcoin Gold team is not in a functional state and Bittrex will not commit to opening a Bitcoin Gold trading market.” What’s your take? Is Bitcoin Gold showing all the signs of being a scam, or is it getting a bad rap? Sound off in the comments below!

Image via Coin News Asia.

This past Tuesday, at block 491,407, hard forked from the bitcoin chain. I first wrote about BTG. If you’re a holder of BTC then you should now have an equal amount of BTC and BTG. Getting to those BTG may not be that easy, however.

Let’s check out the exchange support. It’s not generally a good place to receive a hard forked coin anyways as you do not have control of your private keys. Coinbase is not supporting BTG as the code has not been released to the public for review.

That may change in the future if Coinbase feels BTG is secure. Bittrex will be crediting bitcoin holders with BTG but will.

Like Coinbase, Bittrex notes the lack of code available for review and the fact BTG does not have replay protection. Poloniex too is for the same reasons mentioned above. Then there’s the who says that BTG development is so early that they couldn’t technically support BTG even if they wanted to.

So where can you trade BTG? Bitfinex, HitBTC, and Binance are the largest three by volume to date. And as you can see those that can sell are doing just that.

Hopefully you hold your BTC, and thus your BTG, in a wallet where you control the private keys. If so you will be able to get to that BTG at some point. What you’ll need is a wallet that supports BTG. Bitcoin Gold says that it will provide a list of verified wallets on its webpage, although none are listed yet. How Does Hshare HSR Mining Work.

Then you’ll also need a tool to extract the BTG. Wallet providers will enable these tools once they wrap their heads around Bitcoin Gold. And Bitcoin Gold plans to publish guides on those extraction tools on its webpage. Again, none are available to date. As an example, I store my BTC in a Ledger hardware wallet. I’ll be keeping my eye on Ledger and at some point they’ll publish instruction on how to extract BTG. It’s very unlikely they’ll provide a BTG wallet due to the lack of replay protection.

Once the Ledger extraction tool is out then I’ll look for a BTG verified wallet and extract the BTG. Then I plan on selling on Binance. Who knows what BTG will be worth by then probably not much. For more on cryptos follow me and on Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin at and mine with – use code jWxfye for 3% off. (Oh yeah, thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to reply.) RE: The Question of Scaling - specifically Ethereum vs. Bitcoin I have been an Ethereum fan from the early days - when Charlie H.

Was still there. And I hope they have the least amount of hiccups towards SERENITY (the evolutionary destination of Ethereum via these forks.). I am also a proponent of 'sharding' vs. Simple bloating of the block size. IMHO, sharding is more efficient and is a more realistic solution than the quick fix, bandaid approach to temporarily ease the scalability and speed issues.

On the philosophical front, let's not forget that simply increasing block size is inherently 'anti-egalitarian', anti-decentralization and with the increases of transactions (aka: more adoption), eventually will get bogged down again. Back to same, poor beginning state and back to an unsatisfactory end state again, no?

Imagine that? Namaste, JaiChai P.S. Many precious thanks placed at your feet, sahib! (for your benevolent generosity).

I am still VERY NEW to the steemit platform. So, please accept my puny upvote.