Netherlands headquartered Bitonic B.V. operators of the BL3P bitcoin exchange have stated today they will not be supporting the Bitcoin Gold fork. On October 25th, as you may have heard…another fork of Bitcoin will be occurring. This fork is altering the Proof of Work function that is being used in Bitcoin.
The team of BL3P said that considering the current state of development of the Bitcoin Gold project, it will not be able to support this fork in a secure manner. The biggest obstacle is whether or not Bitcoin Gold will contain secure (mandatory) replay protection. Without proper replay protection, transactions that happen on one chain, can also happen on another chain.
Additionally, the company stated that having a premine/ICO goes against its core values as a Bitcoin company. They also do not see sufficient community support for Bitcoin Gold at this time. Based on these considerations, there will be no support of the Bitcoin Gold fork.
However, just in case, BL3P will be making a snapshot of user balances at the time of the fork. If there is sufficient community support sometime in the future and if it becomes possible to allow withdrawals of Bitcoin Gold in a safe manner, the company would be able to proceed with distribution based on the balances of the snapshot.
For users that do want to receive Bitcoin Gold at the time of the fork, BL3P recommends they withdraw their bitcoins before the fork (October 25th) and handle the event on their own.
What is Bitcoin Gold?
Bitcoin Gold is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain that will occur on October 25, 2017. At the predetermined block height, Bitcoin Gold miners will begin creating blocks with a new proof-of-work algorithm, and this will cause a bifurcation of the Bitcoin blockchain. The original Bitcoin blockchain will continue on unaltered, but a new branch of the blockchain will split off from the original chain. The new branch is a distinct blockchain with the same transaction history as Bitcoin up until the fork, but then diverges from it. As a result of this process, a new cryptocurrency will be born.