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Bitcoin Gold Fork Coming: How To Double Your Bitcoin and Get Free Bitcoins

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It has been only 9 weeks since the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, and we are again discussing another Bitcoin hard fork.
For those of you who don’t know about the previous Bitcoin hard forks and its challenges, read our earlier guides here.

And for those of you who aren’t aware of the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork, pay attention.
In this article, We intend to cover everything you need to know about the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork and how to prepare and benefit from it by doubling your coin holdings and getting free Bitcoin Gold.

Some of you may think this is a good thing as your value will also double!

Note: Doubling of coins does not mean doubling of value, because after a hard fork, the value of both versions of coins are determined based on user sentiments and demand/supply in the market.

So keeping that point in mind, let’s get started…

What is Bitcoin Gold (BTG)

Bitcoin Gold is a new, would be cryptocurrency denoted, as of now, as BTG or “Bgold”. It will be a fork of the original Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto invented in 2008.

Who Is Doing This Fork And When Is It Happening?
 The Bitcoin Gold project is being driven by some developers, miners, and their head Jack Liao, the CEO of the  Hong Kong-based mining equipment manufacturing company, LightningAsic.
Bitcoin Gold’s lead developer is someone anonymous by the name of h4x3rotab and he/she claims that:
Bitcoin Gold is also a real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades.
As per their official website, the exact time is not yet known for this fork.
But the official date for the fork is mentioned as 25th October 2017

Why Is It Happening?
 This is a community-driven hard fork without any consensus voting. It is primarily being driven by a few who believe that the original Bitcoin mining system has become centralized and is monopolized by a handful of mining companies.
They believe this because of ASIC miners which provide a very strong entry barrier for an average user or miner like you and me.
And now, these hard fork supporters want to change that and make the process more decentralized.

How Do BTG Supporters Want To Change This Centralization Problem?
 BTG (i.e. Bitcoin Gold) advocates have decided to solve this problem by forking Bitcoin on 25th October by changing its original protocol.
Specifically, to combat the mining centralization problem, the BTG developers are implementing a different mining algorithm altogether that will be resistant to ASIC chips called Equihash.
This will make ASIC miners irrelevant for mining Bitcoin Gold because, with the implementation of Equihash, Bitcoin Gold will be mineable simply by using cheap GPUs.
  • Note: Currently, Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 mining algorithm (read about SHA-256).
Features of Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
 Bitcoin Gold doesn’t bring many features with it, but…
  • BTG will be based on Equihash so it will be GPU minable.
  • BTG will have inbuilt replay protection because it is a direct fork of BTC.
  • BTG will have a variable difficulty that will change per block. (Good thing for GPU miners.)
  • And looks like BTG will have a pool of pre-mined coins for 16,000 blocks.
Apart from these, there will be no changes like block size adjustment.

And BTG will be following the suit of the original BTC core developers for the future betterment of their coin because they believe that’s the secure way.

How To Get Free BTG

After the BTG fork, you need not do much, but you need to be updated and agile about this subject.
If you want access to your BTG coins, you need to take some preliminary steps before 25th of October:
  1. You should buy as much BTC you can afford before 24th of October and quickly sell them back after the fork. (You can buy or sell at BTCNaira HERE)
  2. Avoid transactions for some days until the dust settles to avoid replay attacks
  3. You should have your private keys, DO NOT keep your Bitcoin with any third party exchange like Coinbase or Luno during this period.
  4. Use hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S and Trezor. Last time, during the Bitcoin Cash fork, these two hardware wallets were the first to support the forked coin.
  5. If you don’t have a hardware wallet, use software wallets like bitWallet(iOS), AirBitz, Coinomi, and Exodus to control your private keys.
  6. If you hold your keys in a software wallet, wait for instructions on how to access your BTG coins.
We will try and post instructions on how to access your Bitcoin Gold as event unfolds.

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