With CERTAINTY its a SCAM, its been researched since August 2017, all the players are scammers, the owners of all the associated websites BTG, BTGCPU, BITCOIN-COIN, are all part of organized ICO-SCAM ring.
The scammers who orchestrate this scam, aren't even writing the code, they're paying 'bounty' of shitcoin to people who write the code as needed, in effect that scammers didn't even have the resources in house to do a BTC CLONE, pathetic when you think how these people are giving professional scammers a bad name.
Fact is nobody would go work for a pump&dump scam operation, not being a real job, thus they just create websites and try to hustle people to work for free.
No way in hell this thing will be operational in 31 hours, right now target is 12NOV@1900UTC
Even if they release so called 'working code' it will take 4 days on average to download the blockchain, as you can't use the bitcoin --datadir=, or copy an existing, you must download and -bootstrap, because this bitch convert existing blockchain from 1mb to 2mb,
In effect even IF there is code it will take days for the POOLS to download and get the blockchain functional, people have been now -testnet mining on POOL.GOLD for 3 weeks, now -testnet mining on btg.suprnova.cc for days, reporting 800K Million sols/sec, which is BULLSHIT, most likely 800k sols/sec, but its all indicative of the fact that NOBODY cares that nothing works.
Solo miners too, once the main-net code is released must download the working block-chain ( convert ) and get it up before they can mine,
I suspect that internally at btcGPU ( bulgaria ) they must have already at the very least have a working block-chain ( its actually easy to enable main-net in the code ), its easy to get the seed-nodes,
But it might be 4-5 days after 12NOV before "REAL MINING" begins, if at all, I doubt code will be released, if its released it will be full of bugs and non-functional, and the team github.com/btcgpu, will fall back into excuse mode and blame DOS for their incompetence, as they have done all along for 2+ months.
We'll know in a few days.
I'm not sure what your point is regarding the blockchain having to be downloaded. Duh, that's how all this stuff works.
As far as all those scam web sites, the BTG team has pointed those out many times.
If you really believe it's a scam I'll take any BTG you have since you apparently don't want it. GeHxnrCk4uDYMutpwKXeAJXDKBbr3s8tP9