We’re thrilled to announce BTG Core wallet v0.17.1!

The BTGPay program will initially consist of two major initiatives.

First, the BTGPay Partner program will help merchants find payment service partners to easily and seamlessly integrate BTG and other crypto payment systems into their existing eCommerce or global payment solutions. The Partner program will also help solutions providers and integrators who want to add support for BTG to their existing services, including BTG debit card programs.

Second, the BTGPay logo and branding program will help merchants easily signal they accept BTG, and help consumers quickly spot those merchants. As part of the branding program, we will also launch a BTGPay market listing program where consumers can actively seek out vendors using BTG, and which merchants can use to promote their products and services to new global customers.

BTGPay: programs connecting merchants, services, and integrators to build solutions – and then helping consumers find them!

When the Bitcoin Gold network launched four months ago on November 12th, many were eager to work with BTG. They understood our coin’s missions: reduce the centralization of Bitcoin mining by returning mining power to individuals, and restore the network effects that follow when mining revenues are broadly distributed (just like the earlier years of Bitcoin.) And while the basic support infrastructure for Bitcoin Gold existed – blockchain, some wallets, a few exchanges – there were limitations.

Merchants and vendors needed integrations for their eCommerce and payment systems. Investors wanted secure holding and transfer systems. Consumers wanted easy ways to find where they could buy and spend their BTG. And everyone wanted Exchanges that transacted into their local fiat or native currencies. All were in short supply in November.

That’s no longer the case. We’re excited to find that when people ask us about a solution, we can usually point them to existing partners and solutions that are ready and working, right now! But people shouldn’t always have to come to us to find each other. We don’t want to be an information bottleneck. BTGPay is about formalizing and sharing this information to enable all our partners to find each other.

So our BTGPay Partner pages will help business find the services they need, and then they’ll be able to use our BTGPay branding and listing pages to help connect with a global consumer base. And we can get all of this information in front of a broad audience – our Social Following has grown well over 100K, increases daily, and our reach expands far beyond!

BTGPay: showing the ways to use BTG today!

We’ll be making more information available over the coming weeks; meanwhile, we invite service vendors and merchants to get in touch if they want to make sure they’re involved as the BTGPay program evolves.

Excited and optimistic,
The Bitcoin Gold Organization
#1CPU1VOTE

BTGPay logo and art available here
General BTG logo and branding here

BTGPay Press Release Chinese

  BTGPay Press Release Korean

Here at the Bitcoin Gold Organization, we’re keenly aware of the need to keep everyone apprised of what we’re doing and planning. To this end, we’ve been working on improving our communications, adding a discussion Forum for our community and launching Discord servers to improve real-time discussion. We’ve put out important updates to our core wallet software, now available on more platforms than ever before, and we’ve significantly expanded our global team, allowing us to make greater progress in a variety of avenues.

We’ll continue the focus on clarity and transparency today by sharing the latest information about our roadmap – not just our development roadmap, although that is crucial, but also our plans for the project and community.

Here are some main points and target timeframes:

[extlsc id=”34687″]

There’s a lot going on in a great many areas! We’ll say a few words about some of them here, but you can expect to hear more details in the weeks and months to come.

Short-Term

We recently released our core wallet software update and will be releasing a fork of the Electrum Wallet tailored to Bitcoin Gold shortly. We’ll also be publishing open source libraries built for BTG under BitCore, BitcoinJS, BitcoinJ, and CoPay to make it easier for developers already working with those libraries to include Bitcoin Gold in their projects. Enabling others to develop with Bitcoin Gold is an high priority! (We’re also involved in actively assisting many third parties with their integration of Bitcoin Gold.)

Core protocol upgrades are on the roadmap. Bech32 addresses are an improvement on the original base58 addresses used in Bitcoin; the new addresses overcome some limitations and make addresses more compatible with today’s technologies (including SegWit and QR codes) as well being more human-friendly. We’ve prioritized Bech32 because it’s an important enabler for future development, including Lightning Network.

Later

We expect to finalize the necessary integrations to fully implement Lightning Network on BTG in Q2. Lightning Network is an exciting and groundbreaking way to enable near-instant payments with even lower fees through dedicated side channels. Because they are off the main chain, Lightning Network saves space in the blocks – but it allows huge numbers of transactions between large entities at very low cost, and these transactions are nearly instant. This is extremely appealing to large entities interested in using BTG, but who need to be confident it can scale dramatically. We’re delivering what they need.

Note that Lightning Network requires SegWit, which is already fully supported by Bitcoin Gold. It also lays the groundwork for future developments, like RSK sidechains with Smart Contracts, and cross-chain atomic swaps, which are a way for individuals to directly perform a coin swap between two different cryptocurrency chains (effectively trading some of one coin for some of another without involving an exchange or third party.)

The next quarter will also bring support for P2Pool (a decentralized approach to mining pools.) Later in the year, the roadmap includes Schnorr Signatures and Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST). Schnorr allows a frequent sender (like a bank or an exchange) to sign a hundred transactions in one batch rather than putting a hundred signatures on the blockchain. MAST are more complex, but simply put, they improve privacy and reduce the load on the blockchain when people use the scripting features already in the Bitcoin Protocol.

Transaction Privacy is an important topic. Currently, wallets and transactions on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain are pseudonymous, not anonymous – just like the original Bitcoin. Nobody can tell who owns a wallet by looking on the blockchain, but anyone can check the balance of a wallet, see where the coins came from and where they went.

There are arguments for keeping it his way – transparency and respectability, some would say. There are also arguments for true privacy. The Bitcoin Gold plan is not committed one way or the other at this point – it will be up to the community to decide which way to go in future development.

Sharing and Voting

The core improvements we’re working on are all of great interest in the broader Bitcoin and crypto worlds, not merely for Bitcoin Gold. Work we do will sometimes be applicable elsewhere, and vice-versa. We’ll also be involved in researching safe and scalable ways to address hard forks, and we’ll be working on ways to evolve smart voting mechanisms within our currency so that hard forks aren’t always necessary. This will allow us to decentralize the decision-making on questions like whether and when to add more smart contract functionality, to provide private transaction capabilities, and other topics applicable to a cryptocurrency.

Developer Community

Everyone knows development is the lifeblood of project like ours, so on top of offering bounties, we’ve directly hired more developers and are working to develop a strong community around BTG and crypto development. We’re starting a btg-dev mailing list and, to provide a structured way to handle future planning, we’ll be formalizing a Bitcoin Gold Improvement Proposal (BGIP) program.

We’re already offering bounties for people who find/fix bugs and improve core wallet features, but we’re also offering bounties for work done to enable more 3rd party services to integrate BTG more easily. We’ll keep trying to draw more developers into the community, and more eyes to our code.

The Ecosystem and Community

Many of the Development Roadmap items make clear our dedication to providing the tools service-providers need, but it’s important to note that we’re also actively involved in helping multiple providers who are working to add support right now. Interested parties should continue reaching out to us. We’re also looking into ways to make it easier for Bitcoin Gold users to interact with legacy (non-crypto) systems and traditional merchants in indirect ways – for example, by providing debit card programs.

We’re getting more and more involved with University and Research centers doing good work and helping train the next generation of developers and crypto entrepreneurs. We’re looking forward to sponsoring hackathons and competitions, and seeing what people can create. We’ll also be supporting the growing body of researchers working to create decentralized fiat-crypto brokerage networks.

On top of all that, we’re also looking to expand the base of crypto enthusiasts and independent developers by sponsoring meetups and conferences. We’ve also started a worldwide ambassador program which we’ve begun to roll out even as it evolves.

We’re dedicated to continuing all of this work – supporting the code Development, the Ecosystem, and the Community – over the long term. Our ability to execute and fund these endeavors will, of course, depend on the future value of our Endowment, but the community can rest assured that we’re doing our best to be good stewards of those funds. We’re always conscious of our responsibility to preserve value for the future while remembering that it’s necessary to spend today in order to fund the work that leads to that future value!

On top of all that, we’re also trying to spend a little time to improve our branding and website. It may seem trivial to some, but better design assets and a cleaner website really do make it easier for novices to become comfortable with new technologies, driving adoption. Introducing more people to the crypto world is also an important part of our mission., and will help continue the growth our industry enjoyed in 2017.

Here’s to a great 2018 for Bitcoin Gold, for the crypto world, and to our whole fantastic community!

Always looking forward,
The Bitcoin Gold Organization
#1CPU1VOTE

More Comfortable Places for the Community

The attention and interest the Bitcoin Gold project has attracted is phenomenal and continues to expand. Part of our ambition for serving this growing community is to continuously improve communications… both by improving our messaging to the community and by enabling discussion within it. We want to preserve open and free speech, but we need to mitigate some of the ill-effects of trolls and discord. At the same time, we want to give people every opportunity to produce and publish thoughtful content and to engage in more elevated discourse.

To help do both of these things, we’re planning to change some of the tools in our toolkit.

From Slack to Discord

Like many projects before us – including some software development and crypto communities – we’re discovering that Slack isn’t the best tool for communication with an active (and sometimes boisterous) user base. Slack is an excellent tool for teams to coordinate and share their work, but it’s not the best for facilitating public interaction. Many of our Community members have proposed moving to Discord, which is also the tool that Dash Nation and the Nebulous Siacoin chose when they moved away from Slack.

After considering several alternatives, we agree.

Discord was initially developed with gamers in mind, so it provides a better toolset for community moderation (which you wouldn’t expect a Slack team to need) and is better at preventing impersonation and spam (which you certainly shouldn’t expect from your own team, but must always expect from the internet!) Because these features are well-implemented and supported, it has been increasingly adopted project communities of all kinds.

We configured a Discord server for the Bitcoin Gold community, and we’ll be moving activity from Slack to Discord over the coming days. If you love Slack or can’t use Discord, don’t worry, Slack isn’t going away! The Slack will still be open and we’ll be there to hear voices and give people answers, but it will no longer be the primary or quickest way to reach the support team. We’ll continue to inform the Slack channels when important announcements are made, but we’ll also be gradually reducing the number of Slack channels.

Our Discord will officially be open for joining beginning January 8th, 2018, and we expect to make it the primary tool for real-time discussions and support beginning January 15th, 2018. Slack will stay open, but channels will be gradually consolidated as volume decreases to simplify monitoring.

Also, A Better Forum for Discourse

Real-time discussion is great when it’s one-on-one, but when a crowd is involved, or developments are moving quickly, it can become hard to follow. Information can literally scroll up off the screen faster than people can read and respond, and we don’t want voices in the community to be lost. On top of that, reviewing a chat transcript to look for a particular topic of discussion is… well, it’s not ideal. But there’s a tried-and-true tool on the web which addresses these tensions: the Forum.

A Forum provides a more stable medium, where people can compose their thoughts more carefully – and since the posts stay put, they’re easier to find later. It’s a better format for developing and posting reference material or in-depth writing, both for community members and staff alike.

That’s why we’ve set up a forum for the Bitcoin Gold community, using the Discourse software package. We hope you agree with us that it’s an excellent, modern, open-source forum platform – it’s clear to us why places like Udacity, Patreon, and Docker have chosen to use it, either publicly or internally. We’ve started testing it out privately and love it, but as any experienced internet citizen knows, a forum is only as good as the community using it. We’re opening it up to the public for early adopters and participants effective immediately, and expect it to become a primary community resource rapidly.

When and where?

Early adopters are welcome to explore the new platforms with us but should bear in mind that structure and format are liable to change as they evolve, especially in the beginning.

We’ll be adding links/navigation to the new services on the website, but for those who want to dive right in, here are the details you’ll need:

Discord Chat Service

Click Here to Join the BTG Discord

• Early access from 2018-01-04
• Discord fully live as of Monday, January 8th, 2018
• Discord becomes official Primary Support Channel as of Monday, January 15th, 2018
• Slack channels consolidated/reduced over time

Discourse Online Discussion Forum

forum.btgofficial.org

The Forum is open to the public effective immediately. It’s still a bit bare but is picking up content. Feel free to offer insights or ask questions!

As public input and participation grow, we expect it to evolve into a primary reference resource rapidly.

Sincerely,
The Bitcoin Gold Community
#1CPU1VOTE

Exchanges

There are currently 45 Bitcoin Gold markets on 24 exchanges listed at CoinMarketCap [EDIT: now 48 markets on 25 exchanges], and more have announced they’re working on opening up to BTG. At the time of writing, the top five global exchanges by dollar volume (according to CoinMarketCap’s ranking) are Bitfinex, Bittrex, Bithumb, Coinbase/GDAX, and Binance. Bitcoin Gold is traded on all but one of these (the exception is Coinbase/GDAX, which still trades exclusively in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin.)

Wallets

There are multiple Bitcoin Gold wallets available and more being developed. The available wallets include the top two hardware wallets (Ledger and Trezor), several desktop wallets, multiple market-leading mobile wallets, and several online wallets. Reputable hardware wallets are, of course, the most secure, while web wallets require more caution.

Pools

There are well over a dozen active pools available for miners who don’t wish to solo mine. It was previously of some concern that the largest pool was well over half the total network hashpower, but the distribution has been improving over time as the smaller pools grew. More decentralization is good news for the ecosystem.

Explorers

There are multiple independent blockchain explorers available. These include BitInfoCharts, BTGEXPLORER.COM, BTGEXPLORER.NET, BTGexp.com, Trezor’s Insight explorer, and Bitcoin Gold Blocks – and more are under development. (Disclosure: BTGEXPLORER.COM was developed with the support of Bitcoin Gold, but runs as an entirely independent entity.)

Nodes

At the time of writing, there are well over 300 full nodes distributed worldwide. The top ten countries are (alphabetically) Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States – but we’re also in Brazil, South Africa, Australia – we’re on every continent except Antarctica!

The Bitcoin Gold Blockchain

The key element, the Bitcoin Gold blockchain, has been very stable. 

The network has been generating blocks as designed after the expected initial burst in the first 24 hours after Launch. Since then, the overall network hash rate and difficulty levels have been fluctuating, as expected, but our difficulty adjustment algorithm rapidly compensates for these conditions and has maintained an average time to find blocks close to the ten-minute target every day since November 12th.

Final Words

It’s worth noting that in the time since our launch, some exchanges have had occasional deposit or withdrawal difficulties. These were infrastructure problems related to heavy user load or had other external causes, and while they sometimes affected BTG, they also affected many other cryptocurrencies. Through all of these periods, the Bitcoin Gold blockchain has been stable and performed properly; no unusual delays are attributable to the BTG blockchain. Any Consumer Exchange or Market Exchange which is having difficulties implementing wallet support for Bitcoin Gold is encouraged to reach out to our development team for assistance; we’ll be happy to help.

We continue to work with a variety of future members of our decentralized Ecosystem to help them get on board, and we’re encouraged by the number of projects and integrations that are in various pipelines.

These are exciting times!

Sincerely,
The Bitcoin Gold Community
#1CPU1Vote

This post aims to provide some clarity about the origins of the Bitcoin Gold blockchain.

The “premine” wasn’t a pre-mine

Around the time of the launch, people constantly asked about the premine. “Premine” is not the best term, but we use it to ensure people know what we’re talking about.

Bitcoin Gold chose to fork (replicate) the entire existing Bitcoin blockchain, with all wallet and transaction history included, and then later begin a brief project mining period to build a store of coins to support the future of the project. This happened after bitcoin block 491,406 (2017-10-24 01:17:35 UTC). At that point, there were already 16.5 million Bitcoin in existence, so there were then 16.5 million Bitcoin Gold in existence.

After this, the project mined 100,000 coins (8000 blocks at 12.5 coins per bock), so it’s more of a post-mine, but we still call it a premine. A true pre–mine is when the makers of coin start a new blockchain with a genesis block and do private mining to accumulate a number of coins, and only then make mining public for others earn coin rewards. With that approach, the makers obviously start out with a huge proportion of the initial coin supply – 100%! That’s would have been a serious problem.

Our premine accumulation of 100,000 coins was about 0.6% of the total number of outstanding coins (which was about 16.6 million Bitcoin Gold coins after the premine), so it’s a tiny fraction – and is even tinier compared to true pre-mines. The rest of the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) coins are in the hands of whoever held the corresponding Bitcoin wallets before the fork – which includes many thousands of individuals and organizations all around the world.

Today, the Bitcoin Gold blockchain is growing and healthy, with many blocks publicly mined on top of the premine. In that regard, it finally makes a kind of sense to call it a premine.

Summing up the Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) supplies:

[table id=1 /]

This is exactly as described in the previously published Bitcoin Gold Roadmap. Moreover, since the blockchain has been continuously mining since launch, these facts can be independently and publicly verified by looking at the blockchain.

The premined coins were all locked up as they were mined

It’s important to note that the code which ran the premine was putting all those coins into “locked” wallets, even as they were being mined.

100% of the coins mined during the premine period were mined directly into multi-signature wallets which cannot be disbursed by any one individual, or even a small group. All disbursements must be signed by four of the six core team members.

Further, 60% of those coins were mined into time-locked wallets which cannot be accessed immediately; they become accessible over the course of the next three years.

This, also, is exactly as described in the previously published Bitcoin Gold Roadmap. Rumors at launch time of any developer’s intent to “dump the premine coins” soon after launch were abundant, but completely false and, in fact, quite impossible!

Again, all of this can be independently verified by knowledgeable people who look at the open-source code that ran the premine.

Most of the coins are locked in an Endowment

The great majority of the premine – 95% – was locked up as funds which are best considered an Endowment. Some (35%) was potentially available for use immediately, and 60% was locked up for the future. The purpose of these funds is to support the growth and maintenance of a healthy ecosystem for Bitcoin Gold, but also to support Bitcoin and the crypto-community generally.

There was, understandably, a lot of attention to the 5% of the premine which was earmarked as “Initial reward for core team” in the Roadmap. That represents 5,000 coins used in order to cover all the costs for the team, infrastructure, development and bounties and they were all covered by the core team.

We will be releasing more information about how the Endowment is being used, and how it is going to be used, in the future. The general plan will be as published in the Roadmap, but we look forward to seeing this project, and the Bitcoin Gold Community, evolve over time!

Always planning for the future,
Bitcoin Gold Community
#1CPU1VOTE

Notes:
Technically proficient parties may be interested in verifying some of information above. The fact that 60% of the premine is time-locked for three years can be seen here; that code segment also shows that the rest of the premine went into multi-signature wallets. The fact that this code is enforced in the consensus rules can be seen here.

Financial sites and cryptocurrencies are alike in this regard: they provide electronic access to people’s funds. They are also alike in this regard: people’s funds are target for fraud, thieves, and con-artists.

We’re not talking about the legions of trolls and nay-sayers that come out in hordes bashing every new coin, making all sorts of preposterous claims that can, and should, be dismissed out of hand. We’re talking about real fraud – these usually take the form of legitimate-looking sites and services that are just looking for a way to steal.

It should go without saying, but it always bears saying again: please be very careful and responsible online.

We are a target

The Bitcoin Gold team wants to encourage individuals and organizations, large and small, to develop software and businesses in the crypto space. To that end, we frequently share information as new providers arise, and we are always pleased when traditional providers announce support for BTG. On the other hand, this means that we are targets for impersonation – there have been very many fake “Bitcoin Gold” sites and social media channels sharing the news of new “services” which are not legitimate, and countless fake accounts made under the names of Bitcoin Gold’s core team. This is done in an attempt to con you into trusting the fake services.

Our partners are targets

The organizations supporting Bitcoin Gold – both new startups, and old standard in the industry – are also targets for impersonation. Again, with fake sites and fake accounts, they want to capture your trust and then capture your coin.

Most of all, you are a target

After all, it’s your funds these criminals are after. They are after your Bitcoin Gold, but they are also after your Bitcoin, your bank accounts, and anything they can get to. Holders of Bitcoin at the time of the October Bitcoin Gold Fork who are trying to access their corresponding new Bitcoin Gold coin are a particular target.

We’d like to point out that If you held BTC before the fork, you hold the same amount of BTG now, and those coins are safe where they are. You do not need to “claim” them for them to become BTG. There is no time limit for you to being using them, and the web sites that give you that impression are absolute frauds; the fake timers are just an effort to convince you to act in haste and make a mistake.

Anyone can be a victim

Don’t let it be you. And it’s worth noting that there can be victims throughout the ecosystem. The history of the internet is full of well-intentioned projects that are not frauds, but who, themselves, become victims of attacks. A man in the middle attack or a hacked and compromised web site can try to steal your funds, and it will appear that the project stole your funds, but they are really just another victim of the fraud.

Be careful

The best steps to be safe with your Bitcoin Gold are the same as the steps to be safe with your banking information, or original Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, and people new to the space must stop stop and think carefully about safety. The safest way to manage any cryptocurrency is an offline or hardware wallet. Next best are desktop wallets and phone wallets, provided you are vigilant and keep your computers/phones very safe. Online wallet services – which include dedicated wallet providers, as well as exchanges that hold your funds – are the next tier. The last alternative is a personal “web wallet,” but those are vulnerable to web site hacking, DNS exploits, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. … all on top of the fact that the phone or computer you use to reach the web wallet could be at risk. Therefore web wallets are not recommended.

Consider reviewing an online guide such as this excellent one, at bitcoin.org.

It’s the third day after the launch of the mainnet, and we’re pleased to say the Bitcoin Gold blockchain is stable and growing as expected.

The Bitcoin Gold Blockchain is running smoothly!

There were some initial hiccups – as should always have been expected on a Day One launch of a new peer-to-peer network with this much interest – but all issues were resolved in the early hours, and the system is now working as designed.

Mining

Interest in mining grew strongly during the first few days as miners and pools all over the world began mining, becoming more decentralized by the moment, and the difficulty adjustment algorithm smoothly increased up to roughly double the starting difficulty. Many miners wanted to experiment; perhaps some hoped for a “gold rush” of easy mining in the first hours. This turned out not to be true, because our per-block difficulty adjustment kept adjusting to maintain a proper 10-minute block time average. Late in the second day, mining interest began to wane, and the algorithm reduced the difficulty, maintaining a good average block time.

This is noteworthy because it means the new Bitcoin Gold blockchain is not over-attracting hash rate. In addition, mining pools have begun to pay out rewards to their miners.

Transfer and Payments

BTG transfers and payments are taking place between wallets; multiple wallet providers support BTG Gold, and more continue to add support. Everyone who held Bitcoin at the time of the October fork now has Bitcoin Gold, and users have been tentatively passing some around. We expect this transaction volume to increase steadily.

Exchanges Next?

Exchanges are necessarily cautious and conservative with funds; they will not open up for deposits and withdrawals of Bitcoin Gold until they determine that the network is fully stable, reliable, and safe. At that time, the markets will be able to conduct what economists call price discovery. Until then, most trading on exchanges has been taking place only as BTG Futures. Please ask your service provider for further information.

Next steps:

• Bitcoin Gold Official Mining Guide
• Bitcoin Gold Official Web Forum
• Bootstrap file download*
• Electrum fork

*We heard from the community that the initial blockchain download takes too long time. so we decided to provide a Bootstrap Bittorrent file to help. (Ready in 1-2 days)

We’re grateful for the community

The network stability has been greatly improved and the number of full nodes is growing steadily, however the network is still in its early stage. Block time can vary as the hash rate fluctuates, but all signs indicate that the difficulty adjustment algorithm is working effectively. We will keep monitoring the network.

We’re always happy to share such good news with our community. The support and encouragement of those who understand what we’re trying to accomplish really buoys the team in the face of waves of negative sentiment that are inevitably manufactured.

We thank all those who helped us fend off those attacks against our users, miners, and pools. The resilience of Bitcoin Gold in the face of these attacks verifies that an entity that achieves this level of decentralization is invulnerable and armored as a cryptocurrency has to be.

Bitcoin Gold Community

#1CPU1VOTE