One of the most asked questions is, “how can I mine Bitcoin Gold?” … so we are making a step-by-step tutorial.

1. You can choose a pool to mine from Bitcoin Gold main page under the ecosystem tab (Tap here to show ecosystem).
2. For the next steps we will assume that you have chosen pool.gold.
3. Download mining software:
   1. For NVIDIA – Download
   2. For Radeon – Download (note that Chrome may report this archive as dangerous, we have scanned it on 3 different platforms and no issues were found, only Chrome is reporting a false positive)
4. Get a wallet address if you don’t have one – you can use BTGWallet.online (keep all the keys saved to be able to make transactions later), Coinomi, Bitcoin Gold Core Wallet or any wallet made by an Exchange.
5. Edit the configurations
   1. For NVIDIA: edit start.bat file and input you BTG wallet address and then the worker name. An example line start:
      miner –server eu.pool.gold –user GSrP5KGxrgBXV1kQkAPy2g3fmgcUeoESMw.MyWorker1 –pass x –port 3044
   2. For Radeon: edit config.txt and input your BTG wallet address and then the worker name. An example :
      -zpool eu.pool.gold:3044
      -zwal GSrP5KGxrgBXV1kQkAPy2g3fmgcUeoESMw.worker
      -zpsw z
      -ftime 1
      -i 6
      -tt 75
      -allpools 1
6. Start the mining: Double click start.bat and let the magic happens.

Happy and profitable mining!

We’re thrilled to announce a start date to the community:

November 12, 2017 – 7:00 PM (19:00 UTC)

At this point, we will provide the Bitcoin Gold full node client download on our website. The BTG blockchain will officially be live, with blocks mined openly by users and pools from all around the world.

Wallets and exchanges will be able to process deposits, withdrawals and trades (as soon as they are ready). This is the culmination of months of hard work, which have led to many changes and improvements, including:

• Equihash PoW change
• Implementation of full Replay Protection (BIP143 SIGHASH) (protecting the community from attacks)
• Implementation of a Unique “G” and “A” prefixed Address Format (avoiding accidental coin transactions to incorrect destinations)
• Refinement of the per-block difficulty  adjustment algorithm (to better respond to dynamic changes in hashing power)
• The usual minor tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements
• Successful mining on several generations of Public Testnet
• Network & pool integration

We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the Bitcoin Gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time. Thank you to all those who have donated their hash power to this effort! We’d also like to extend our gratitude to all those service providers who have been working so hard with us to prepare a fully functional ecosystem at launch. 

The results are living proof that a friendly fork can lead to healthy, organic growth of a new crypto community.

The team is now redoubling efforts in the following areas:

• Improving our documentation so that accurate, up-to-date info is easily accessible for mining
• Assisting providers of services (exchanges, wallets) to integrate BTG – Full technical info
• Assisting press and social media communities with access to information and services coming soon (official wallet and mining guide, official community forum, etc.)

We know that many of you share our happiness and joy as we mark this exciting moment. 

#1CPU1VOTE

With best wishes.

Bitcoin Gold Community

We take the opportunity of this update to inform you of the latest news of BTG network tests and to invite all of the miners that are planning to participate in this project to test their machines in the Bitcoin Gold test blockchain.

The Bitcoin Gold testnet is proving the stability and security of the network, including the new difficulty adjustment algorithm and two-way replay protection, and is helping wallets, pools, and application developers to integrate BTG and fully prepare for the imminent mainnet launch.

What’s a testnet?

A testnet is a temporary blockchain used for testing the network. Testnet coins are useless and distinct from real Bitcoin or Bitcoin Gold (they are never supposed to have any real value). A testnet allows application developers and security researchers to perform experiments without having to risk losing real money or worry about breaking the main blockchain. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet

Who should use the testnet?

The Bitcoin Gold testnet can be useful for people who want to test the p2p network and consensus rules before the launch of the mainnet. Some of the more common uses of the testnet are for:

• Pool operators: Test the setup and the integration of Bitcoin Gold into their mining pools and test end-to-end CPU/GPU mining.
• Wallet developers: Test the integration of Bitcoin Gold into their software or hardware wallets.
• Exchanges: Test on-chain transactions.
• Pro users: Test security features like replay protection.

Track the process of testnet.

Click here for full technical info about testnet.

Bitcoin Gold team.

We are excited about the way the testnet is working.

On the second day we have applied changes about the starting difficulty, some more minor settings and restarted the network. Currently we have 57 operating nodes and more than 200 mined blocks. The network is stable and all of the transactions are executed.

Changes required:

• Currently we are not experiencing any issues of the network. We see that the difficulty is dynamically adjusted and the block time is between 3 minutes and 24 minutes.

Next steps:

• We are in touch with major exchanges and wallet providers that have asked for the replay protection and the unique address format in order to support us, follow their statements and start working on integration with Bitcoin Gold. So all the users can receive their funds without any problems.
• We will start planning the release of the main network very soon and will come up with release date as soon as we are ready to announce it.
• Go to previous BTG Daily Update to check our complete timeline.

We take advantage of the opportunity to thank to users, pools operators, wallets and exchanges that are helping with the development and the testnet progress.  

All the received help is highly appreciated! Thanks for all of the support!

Bitcoin Gold community.

It was a long day and even longer night for the team of Bitcoin Gold on the start the official testnet. We targeted this test launch of the network to the pool providers and the miners as one of the vast changes in BTG is the PoW algorithm. We are really excited to share that more than 19000 people and more than 31000 mining machines participated in the first hour of test mining on the pools supporting BTG. Based on the results that the network provided for the last 15 hours we can conclude that the first step to the launch of the testnet is successful and that the PoW change is working as expected.

Actions required:

1. We have seen that the difficulty starts too low and the block time is less than 5 seconds for the first 500 blocks and needed 15 hours to reach to 7 minutes. That is why we are rising the difficulty network start and will also adapt the difficulty change algorithm based on the data that we have observed.
2. We have found that some nodes cannot connect to the network, the solution is already applied.
3. DNSSeeds seem not to connect to provide node network information. We will investigate further this problem and apply a fix immediately. For now all of the pool operators and people that wants to connect to the network can use as a manually connected nodes : eunode.pool.gold and asianode.pool.gold .
4. Because of the low difficulty we have observed large percent of orphan blocks and a lot of rejected shares. As we apply the difficulty fix, this will stop immediately.

Next steps:

1. On 11/02/2017 at 2 PM UTC we will do a restart of the test network. All of the mined block will be invalidated and everything will start from block 1210320. That way we are simulating the start of the main net and we can observe in detail how our blockchain works.
2. We will request all the people to execute the following actions in order to connect to the new network *if you are not running the latest software*:
   

   bgold-cli getinfo # that way you will check on which block are you. If block >= 1210320 execute steps 2, 3 else go to 4 bgold-cli getblockhash 1210320 # the result from this is used in 3. *please stop here* if the result is 00005a7a2f2b6b85ed6735d571cae7a2ce2fce898964376e77662c69aa739f49 bgold-cli invalidateblock <#result from 2.> bgold-cli stop # go to your BTCGPU folder git pull origin master make clean && make bgoldd -testnet -daemon -reindex -addnode=eunode.pool.gold -addnode=asianode.pool.gold

3. Wallet provider support for BTG integration.

Thanks for all of the support!
Bitcoin Gold team

Bitcoin Gold has just implemented a solution called SIGHASH_FORK_ID replay protection. It is an effective two-way replay protection mechanism that enforces a new algorithm to calculate the hash of a transaction so that all new Bitcoin transactions will be invalid on Bitcoin Gold blockchain and vice versa. This makes replaying transactions impossible.

https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/109

What is a transaction replay?

In the context of a Bitcoin fork, a replay happens when a transaction is valid on both sides of the fork. So a transaction can be broadcast on both chains after the fork and be a valid transaction and confirm on both. This means that if you intend on sending coins on one fork, you could accidentally end up sending your coins on the other fork as well since someone else could take your transaction and replay.

What is a replay protection?

Replay protection is a safety feature that makes sure that transactions on one chain are invalid on the other chain, thus preventing transaction replay and the possible resulting loss of funds. Replay protection can be achieved in multiple ways; anything from having a blacklisted address or output type (e.g. if an output to address X is in the transaction, consider it invalid) to changing the signature scheme to changing the transaction format entirely.

Timeline

Completed

• Equihash PoW change
• Difficulty adjustment algorithm
• Network & pool integration
• SIGHASH_FORK_ID replay protection
• Unique address format
• Local Testnet succesful

Services before mainnet deployment

• Bitcoin Gold Official Mining Guide
• Bitcoin Gold Blockchain Official Explorer
• Bitcoin Gold Official Web Forum
• Bitcoin Gold Wallet Guide

Next steps

• Launch public testnet (*)
• Adjust network parameters
• Prepare for mainnet launch
• Deploy mainnet
• Electrum fork
• 3rd party Wallets and Exchanges integration
• Decentralized mining starts

(*) Bitcoin Gold team will deploy a public testnet opens to miners from all over the world in a few hours. To learn more about testnet, please stay tuned in #mining Slack Channel.

More info in next hours.

About BTG

Bitcoin Gold is a community-led project to create a hard fork of Bitcoin to a new proof-of-work algorithm to make Bitcoin mining decentralized again. Satoshi Nakamoto’s idealistic vision of “one CPU one vote” has been replaced by a reality where the manufacture and distribution of mining equipment has become dominated by a very small number of powerful entities, some of whom have engaged in abusive practices against individual miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole. Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for countless new people around the world to participate in the mining process with widely-available consumer hardware that is manufactured and distributed by reputable mainstream corporations. A more decentralized, democratic mining infrastructure is more resilient and more in line with Satoshi’s original vision.

[email protected]    [email protected]

Here is our second daily dev update.

1. Build procedure
   H4x has reviewed and merged a pull request from JockerCatz that is giving useful information for building on Linux.
2. CI platform
   Minor updates on the Travis CI made by H4x.
3. Unique address format
   H4x added address conversion functionality and more test cases for the BTG unique address format. (BTG address prefixes are “G” and “A”)
4. Testnet
   Testnet has been successfully synced on Martin’s MacBook. But on slower machines, as soon as the fork block is synced, the process of block validation stops. This will not be a problem when BTG nodes are available.
5. Mining
   Martin has started the modification of the node-stratum in order to provide a solution for the pool providers and the miners. The main problem is the change of the protocol that is introduced in BTG. The first 4 bytes of the reserved header field from zcash blockformat are actually the block height. Currently the protocol is being tested.

We want you to know that we expect the public testnet to be started on November 1st!

Do not hesitate to Ask us anything on Slack: Join Slack
Follow, like, retweet on Twitter: BTG on Twitter

Here is the first daily update on Bitcoin Gold development. We have decided that this is best way for everyone to stay up to date with all the important development progress that is taking place. These updates may not happen literally every day, but we will aim for at least three to four updates per week.

1. Replay protection
   We have spent several hours on the pull request for replay protection: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/55. This method of replay protection is sufficient to keep all transactions safe from replay attacks, and we are very likely to merge this pull request in the upcoming days. In addition to that pull request, we received another pull request from an anonymous contributor for a different implementation of replay protection: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/83. We will award him or her the bounty because the code meets the requirements originally described in the bounty: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/issues/51.  We are very encouraged with the success our bounty program has already achieved in the very early days of this project.
2. Unique Address Format
   H4x has decided that Bitcoin Gold addresses must start with the letters G and A in order to clearly distinguish from Bitcoin addresses, which start with 1 and 3. We hope this measure will prevent people from mistakenly sending coins on the wrong side of the fork. Moreover, in the wallets supporting BTG there must be a safety feature that doesn’t let people send money to incorrect wallets. The pull request is going to be merged today: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/80.
3. Testnet
   Martin has spent most of his time working on the testnet. Currently the main problem is that the flags for initial sync never get to a completed state, because the way the Bitcoin Gold client is currently made is to be able to sync the pre-fork legacy blockchain from the Bitcoin nodes. We think this is the best way to make sure that we are providing the best connection to everyone. But the unfortunate consequence of this method is that the height shown in the legacy BTC nodes is much higher than the height of the BTG fork. So we are currently implementing a logic to protect from this.
4. Other
   A lot of people are asking various questions about the Bitcoin Gold dev process and the way BTG works, and we put great efforts to answer all of them.
   We have a lot of time wasted by people who are publishing “hate” topics with attacks on Bitcoin Gold, and the only way to refute the claims is to provide facts. Each claim shall be based on facts, if there are no facts presented, it is just a derogatory attack. We are doing our best to provide stable and secure solution for everyone, to support all the mining pools, the wallet providers, and the exchanges.

All the Bitcoin Gold Team is working hard and we are confident in the success of Bitcoin Gold.