As mentioned in our previous article, the Bitcoin Gold hard fork will take place on 25 Oct, and everyone should have an idea about how to safely prepare for it!
Key summary:
- The safest way is to keep your Bitcoin on a wallet where you have the control to the private keys. It can be desktop wallets like Electrum or Exodus, or hardware wallets like Ledger Nano S and Trezor.
- Avoid moving your Bitcoin on that day, and also after the fork to wait for everything to settle.
- When the fork is settled, each wallet provider would provide instructions on how to claim your Bitcoin Gold on the specific wallet, but we will also have tutorials about it, please stay tuned!
Why should I move to wallets where I have the control to the private keys?
To put things simply, when you have control to your private keys, you are 100% guaranteed to have the forked coin. The problem is just how to split them on the wallet.
However, if for example your coins are stored on an exchange wallet, they have the rights to decide whether to issue the new coins to you or not. Anything can happen but you lose the control of it.
Why is this so important? Because Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin will share the same address at the beginning, so when you have the private key, you can control the coins on that address. Even if your current wallet does not support Bitcoin Gold, you always have the option to import the private key on other supporting wallets to claim them.
Why should I avoid moving my Bitcoin after the fork?
As mentioned in another article, a hard fork is not compatible with old versions of the protocol so the network might be unstable during the time. However, more importantly, Bitcoin Gold does not have a Replay-Protection, which can be a huge issue.
Again, to put it simply, a replay attack means when Alice sends Bitcoin to Bob on the Bitcoin blockchain, Bob can also claim that Alice has sent Bitcoin Gold to him and “steal” Alice’s Bitcoin Gold. This is the same when Alice sends Bitcoin Gold to Bob, he can steal her Bitcoin. To avoid this, the previous Bitcoin Cash hard fork has implemented a replay protection, but this is not the case for Bitcoin Gold. Although they claim to be developing a strong replay protection, there are not any updates yet so it is better to wait and not move your Bitcoin shortly after the fork.
So what to do now?
Whether you are bullish or bearish on Bitcoin Gold, you should not lose your coins due to careless mistakes! Therefore, the best thing to do right now is following the summary above: send your Bitcoin to a wallet with control to your private keys, and wait until the fork is settled. Also don’t forget to follow us for future updates!
The article is extracted from our medium blog post.
Sources:
https://99bitcoins.com/the-bitcoin-gold-hard-fork-explained-coming-october-25th/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/segwit2x-and-case-strong-replay-protection-and-why-its-controversial/