The Bitcoin Gold development team recently issued a statement which addressed recent criticism.
With the upcoming bitcoin fork scheduled to take place this coming 25 October, the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) project has recently come under scrutiny. Several users took to social media, as well as BTG’s slack channel to question several aspects of the project. Some have questioned its unfinished code and implementation while others have raised questions concerning the legitimacy of the project.
The rumors and criticism started to gain momentum after a user used a reverse Whois background search to find the owner of the BTG domain. Further research also confirmed that the BTG owner also owns several other cryptocurrency domains.
The same user also discovered several glaring gaps in the project’s code and implementation. The main issues included an unfinished consensus algorithm as well as a lack of added replay attack protection. Overall, the code and implementation showed no promising signs of progression in its development, despite the fork being a week away.
Another issue which caused a fair share of scrutiny is the team’s decision to implement a pre-mine code. Essentially this means that the developers will have a large amount of BTG, that is if the project does successfully fork.
In order to address the criticism and scrutiny, the BTG team released a statement earlier this months which methodically addressed the main concerns.
The team explained that the two largest issues they face are first, attacks by individuals in the crypto community who don’t seem to understand the inherently decentralized nature of cryptocurrency. Secondly, the team stated a lack of volunteers and resources more than once to explain its delayed development.
The team went into detail explaining every raised concern, started with the lack of replay protection. While the team emphasized the importance of replay protection long before the criticisms circulated, they did state that, compared with the PoW change, the replay protection code is relatively simpler. This is the first concern where they stated the lack of volunteers, by saying that so far, only one volunteer has come forward and is currently working on the code development.
In terms of the unfinished Equihash implementation, the team confirmed that the consensus change is still incomplete. In addition, the team confirmed that the adjustment algorithm is yet to be merged with the code, partly due to the change in difficulty.
The team also addressed concerns over the pre-mine code by stating that the idea came from a fundraising during July. While the team admitted that the code does not reflect the vision and opinions of the entire team, they also did not outright state that it will be removed. As justification, they once again emphasized that the BTG is entirely made up of volunteers.
In addition to the already harmful criticisms, a website has recently emerged which claims to be able to allow users to claim BTG before the scheduled fork. The website, “claimBTCGPU” states that users can enter their BTC into the system which would allow them to pre-claim their BTG, but they won’t be able to spend it.
The website gives remarkably detailed instruction with accompanying pictures which illustrates the process step by step. In addition to instructions, the site also claims to be a BTG wallet platform which prioritizes BTG transactions.
While the BTG has not yet released an official statement pertaining to the website, many users have claimed the site to be fake via social media platforms. Users have been advised to abstain from using the site until it has received an official acknowledgment from the BTG team.
