I was reading some articles on Reddit regarding the upcoming Fork of BTC to create Bitcoin Gold or BTG. I stumbled upon one of the the post from Reddit user:
EnviousArmReddit user link:
https://www.reddit.com/user/EnviousArmAll the credits goes to Reddit user: EnviousArm as this user has done all the efforts and work. I am just trying to bring this to light for bitcointalk members. Thank you. Link to the post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/757jf4/here_is_why_bitcoingold_is_shady_and_a_scam_you/Update 3: I've done a reverse whois lookup on their website, and found a ton of domains registered under the same email (not same IP) in their whois. the domains look super damn scammy by the way, you can check them out yourself here:
https://i.imgur.com/HG31eie.pngAnd for the actual list if you don't wanna see a picture, here:
http://viewdns.info/reversewhois/?q=xiangliao%40gmail.comI got the email from:
https://www.whois.com/whois/btcgpu.org BTG is, without a doubt, a complete scam.
Looks like they tried running several ICOs, one of them is even still active called sandcoin.org (which is obviously a scam too) Update 2: *
Premined:
https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/2 Unfinished pow implementation:
https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/15 Replay protection not implemented (You might lose your Bitcoins if you try to transfer or sell your airdropped Bitcoin gold be careful!):
https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/issues/18 No change of difficulty algorithm implemented (they will compete with other GPU-mined coin for hashpower)
No commits merged to main public repo in last 21 days
Without the difficulty fix alone, this coin will crater rapidly.
Assuming it survives that, without replay protection, big exchanges won't list it, and wallets won't support it. The code is unfinished and in flux that no-one can seriously review it yet, and there's no commit for a testnet definition yet. (thanks to /u/StrawmanGatlingGun)
Update 1: In their Website-Snapshot from the github (
https://github.com/BTCGPU/website) they stated that the fork snapshot already processed: "Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is a new proof-of-work cryptocurrency that will be hard forked from the Bitcoin blockchain on October 1 at block height 487427", which actually ended up being September 28th (
https://blockchain.info/block-height/487427) partial info thanks to /u/rhuxx for the find.
As some of you may know, Bitcoingold is attempting to fork Bitcoin at the 25th of October. However in the past they decided they'll fork during the Bitcoincash date, both of which have ended up confusing me thus I've decided to do more research on the matter.
As I dug in deeper Bitcoingold started falling apart in front of my eyes losing all my trust in it. Here is what I've found.
First I read about this to get a better idea behind it:
https://medium.com/@EthereumRussian/is-another-hardfork-going-to-kill-bitcoin-bitcoin-gold-e49b24ad8a9The article mentioned there's been an ICO page, intrigued I decided to do a quick google search and found this 29 August bitcointalk thread that has more information regarding it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btcgpu-change-sha256-to-equihash-gpu-mining-only-protect-decentralize-2046790Along with the original Bitcoingold developer thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bitcoingpu-btcgpu-forked-spinoff-new-pow-adjusting-size-cap-segwit-2133536It seems that they have possibly ran an ICO (Unsuccessfully most likely) but most certainly had premined the coin, thus I went to their website which at the time (9th of October) only ran a splash screen:
http://btcgpu.org/ in an attempt to confirm my doubts.
This didn't lead me far, I needed to confirm those claims by myself, thus I went to the wayback machine (a wayback machine takes snapshots of websites so you can tell what changed in a website over time) and picked the August 31 date of the bitcoingold website.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170831032225/http://btcgpu.org/This confirmed the rumors, the website owners/original developers intended to run an ICO (which may or may not been successful) and also premined 16000 Blocks, worth at least 200,000 Bitcoin gold. The ICO price was supposedly 1 BTC = 10 BTG.
Since they are holding that information away from us and hiding it, this makes me believe that, bitcoingold is infact a scam and an attempt to milk the Crypto community out of their money, please don't fall into this scam and don't buy bitcoingold, dump it and let others know you can even do your own research with the Wayback machine I linked above or any time machine.
Regards, A fellow crypto investor
tl;dr BTG (Bitcoin gold is pre-mined 200,000+ BTG, and previously offered as an ICO, now they are trying to hide both of that information from us and telling people to dump their alts to get free "Bitcoin gold". the fork dates do not match, they specified different dates 3 times, once in their github page (1th october, and the block ended up being mined at 28th september) and a third time as 25th of october. all this combined information makes this me believe with no doubt that this is a scam in the making, and you should all dump your BTG as soon as you get it and never, ever buy BTG. also there is no replay protection, incomplete pow implementation, and no difficulity adjustment just the replay protection alone means you can lose your BTC by trying to sell/transfer your BTG, whois email associated domains shows complete scammy icos and domains registered under the email, this without a doubt they are 100% scammers.).