Trust the unknown. Trust yourself. Let go of searching for answers and the answers will appear. Satoshi Club can help in your searching by conducting AMAs with the best projects in cryptospace. And today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Bitcoin Gold. The AMA took place on 15 September and our guests were h4x3rotab, Lead Developer, Co-Founder at Bitcoin Gold, Martin Kuvandzhiev, Operations Lead, Co-Founder at Bitcoin Gold and Edward Iskra, Communications Director at Bitcoin Gold.
The total reward pool was 500$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Hi everyone! Welcome to another episode of our AMA series
Edward Iskra: Hello!
Serg | Satoshi Club: Welcome to Satoshi Club! 🙂 how is your day?
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Hi Edwards, welcome to Satoshi Club
h4x3rotab: Hi all! Glad to be here
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Glad to have you as our guest
Serg | Satoshi Club: we are glad to have you here as well 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: How should we call you? 😊 @h4x3rotab
Serg | Satoshi Club: Elon Musk’s son has a similar name 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Kids grow fast 😊
Edward Iskra: I say Musk’s son’s name wrong. I pronounce the “X” as “Chi” like the greek letter we use for the variable! (And since I don’t actually speak Greek, I probably pronounce that wrong, too.)
Serg | Satoshi Club: haha 😁 his son will have trouble at school. so, @h4x3rotab , @MentalNomad , please tell us a bit about yourself and how did you get into crypto
h4x3rotab: Just call me h4x, or Hang 😄
Edward Iskra: I call him H4x online, and Hang in real life. 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Hang sounds better 😊
h4x3rotab: LOL
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: More melodious 😀 h4x feels like I’m talking with a computer:grinning:
Serg | Satoshi Club: @MartinKey, welcome onboard
Martin Kuvandzhiev: thanks! Hello everyone!
Serg | Satoshi Club: so, can you tell us a small introduction about you guys and about Bitcoin Gold?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: I am 26 and I have joined BTG in August 2017. I run a development company and have 9 years of development experience. In my spare time I enjoy playing guitar and riding motorcycle.
Serg | Satoshi Club: what motorcycle do you have? 🙂
Martin Kuvandzhiev: Harley-Davidson Street 750 and Vespa GTS300 Touring
Edward Iskra: I’m from the USA. I was born here to Polish immigrants, so I also speak Polish. I don’t speak any Greek. 😉
I studied Computer Science & the History of Technology for two undergrad degrees, and later did an MBA where I also studied the history of Business & Capitalism – but my focuses were Entrepreneurship & Innovation.
I worked most of my life in IT – first desktop support, then as a datacenter guy in places like GE and Pfizer, and then as an IT Director for an NYC investment bank (a small one.)
I first looked at crypto back in 2012 and considered getting involved, but did not. In 2017, however, I started building multi-GPU mining rigs for Ethereum. When the Bitcoin Gold fork was announced, which would use the same graphics cards but would mine something that was more like Bitcoin, I found my home, and I’ve been working with BTG ever since.
I joined the team in November of 2017, before the first block of BTG was mined, so I’m a “noob” compared to Martin and Hang, who are both co-founders. But all three of us are part of the Board for the project – and I’m an old fart compared to them. 🙂
Serg | Satoshi Club: thanks for the intro 🙂 old is not an age, it’s a feeling 😀 so, let’s feel young
Edward Iskra: Yes!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: @h4x3rotab what about you?
h4x3rotab: Hang Yin, I’m from China and now living in Beijing. I’m the lead developer and the co-founder. I first knew Bitcoin since 2013 but only started to look at it closely since 2016. In the next year I started Bitcoin Gold project. I was a software engineer in Google, but now fully committed to blockchain industry
Edward Iskra: Hang’s English isn’t always perfect, but I’d take his code over anyone else’s. 😉
Serg | Satoshi Club: life at Google was boring compared to crypto I guess 🙂
h4x3rotab: Haha
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Thank you, Hang 😊 So, thank you for your introductions guys. In the first part we have questions collected from our community via our platforms. Ready to jump into it?
Edward Iskra: Sure.
Q1 from bitcointalk user gustafsson
You proposed to the community the posibility to mine with GPU again, instead of ASICS. Tell us how many miners have joined your platform and from what countries are the majority. I think you can see the locations of the pools
Edward Iskra: I’m afraid we can’t answer that question directly – we cannot see the locations of the pools.
We do know that there are many pools – up to 20 of them mining at any time. (See https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoingold for a list of most pools)
Some pools, including our largest, have up to four different location throughout the world, and we have no way of knowing which has more hashrate.
The dominant pools have changed over time – in the beginning, Suprnova had the most hashrate. Today, 2miners has the most hashrate. Tomorrow? Who knows.
It’s entirely decentralized.
h4x3rotab: Yeah, I think the point of cryptos is about anonymity and decentralization. It means nobody knows why you are and thus there’s no censorship at all
Edward Iskra: like I said, we can’t know.
However, I can tell you that we do have a strong following in Europe (based on node counts) and we are especially popular in the Russian mining communities.
We have a lot of people around the world doing small-scale mining. Since you don’t need an ASIC, it’s easier to get the necessary equipment in some far-off places.
Serg | Satoshi Club: do you think it’s related to the cost of energy? In Russia it’s cheaper
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: True. The costs of entering are lower as well. What’s the min. hardware requirements that someone needs to have in order to start mining?
Edward Iskra: It’s absolutely related to the cost of energy, yes.
I know my profit margin (I’m in the USA, in NJ, just outside of NYC) is very small on mining, sometimes losing a few cents per day. But I mine for the long term.
Most states in the USA net a profit, because NJ electricity is more expensive than most.
h4x3rotab: And of course the low tempreture can also help
Martin Kuvandzhiev: As I am from Bulgaria and I am going to Russia as a speaker on different events I would say that Russian people are very open to new technology. The cost of the electricity is lower than in most of the countries, but also the mining communities are huge. As a miner who have started in 2016 I have been searching for Q&As in Russian
which helped me a lot when I have been putting together my first mining rig
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Is it still running, your first mining rig?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: yup, it is still runnning and contributing to the BTG network
Serg | Satoshi Club: Bulgarian has similarities to Russian, so, this helped I guess 🙂
Edward Iskra: There is mining code out there (from independent devs) for AMD and NVidia GPUs, but not all cards are supported.
The primary “requirement” is enough memory – you can’t mine BTG on a 3 GB card.
I started mining BTG since 2017 with AMD RX470s and NVidia GTX 1060s.
Generally, NVidia cards are more efficient on our algo.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I have to say I was mining from 2017 as well but I switched it off this year 🙂 my mining experience is over for now
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Ok, thank you for your answers. Do you want to add anything or should we proceed to Q2?
Edward Iskra: Yeah, the earlier part of the year was not “high-profit.” I can understand why you stopped.
I’m not running my 1060s now, and sold off my RX470’s two years ago.
Martin Kuvandzhiev: The winter is coming and my way to keep my apartment and office warm is using the rigs. Specially with the new GTX30xx series this will be amazing ways for gamers to gain some revenue for the investment of buying the cards.
Edward Iskra: But I still run my 1070’s – several rigs, plus the GPUs in my workstation. Exactly – my brother-in-law wants one of my 1070 rigs for heat this winter. The “waste” heat is not waste when it means you run your furnace less!
Serg | Satoshi Club: It’s more like a hobby I guess 🙂 for some people
Edward Iskra: For many, it’s a seriously business.
Even if you don’t profit per day – if you’re also investing in BTG and holding, it’s a great way to invest steadily, every dat, stacking BTG sats.
You can pay in electricity to “buy” your own BTG, no KYC needed!
Q2 from Bitcointalk user JonahAp
There was an extremely long attack chain of over 1300 blocks mined between July 1 and July 10, 2020, against Bitcoin Gold’s network can you tell us the level of impact that this attack had on your network and how you were able to resolve the issue. What further actions did Bitcoin Gold take to ensure the security of the network from such chain attacks in the future
Edward Iskra: We’re happy to say there was virtually no impact from this huge attack! We continuously monitor the Nicehash market (which is where the power came from), so we were aware that the attack was ongoing.
We also maintain communications in emergency channels with most of our exchanges, so we were able to make them aware.
Lastly, our community of pool operators are very cooperative and responsive when we reach out to them. In this case, the attacker was not hitting us for the first time – they attacked just a few weeks prior, causing a fork of 64 blocks – however, a pool successfully performed a counterattack to bring back the honest blocks. That was June 21.
It looks like the same attack came back on July 1st to make an even bigger attack.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Could you tell us what’s the interest in this attacks?
Serg | Satoshi Club: how much does it cost approximately to get 51% of the network?
Edward Iskra: When we saw how long the attacker was mining – and how much power they were buying at Nicehash with over-inflated prices – we realized they might make a very big one, so we decided not to wait and see if the counterattackers would work again.
Instead, we wrote a checkpoint into the BTG Core Wallet code and sent it to all our pools and exchanges. The checkpoint was about 50 blocks after the attack began. The pools upgraded their nodes and that meant they would not switch to an attack before that.
The miner kept mining for nearly 10 days. It was about 1325 blocks when they finally released their very long chain…
Martin Kuvandzhiev: It depends on the duration of the attack and the price on the mining market for our algorithm. It may go up to hundreds of thousands USD
Edward Iskra: But the honest pools ignored those blocks as invalid because of the checkpoint. The network rejected the attack, and all our exchanges were spared.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: So what was the actual damage?
Serg | Satoshi Club: basically no financial damage as I understand
Martin Kuvandzhiev: only for the attacker
Edward Iskra: There was zero actual damage – no honest pools lost their mining rewards, and no exchanges were double-spent. (However, there were about 85,000 BTG worth of double-spends attempted.) The attacker likely spent between 13 BTC and 15 BTC buying the power. That was a loss.
Serg | Satoshi Club: strange, it is not so profitable, why trying then? actually it is 🙂 I miscalculated
Edward Iskra: Well, 2 types try them:
1st type: is using the 51% attack to cause a reversion in order to make a double spend. For example, this huge chain? It included 85,000 BTG of double-spend. If the attack worked, they would have been able to get 85,000 worth of BItcoin traded out of the targeted chain.
2nd type: is just trying to steal blocks via mining. This is usually not profitable, because sometimes they lose. In fact, we know there is a pool that will counter-attach when people cheat like this. As a result, trying to cheat with 51% attack is never profitable on BTG.
An MIT Media Lab group wrote a paper about this, it mentions the BTG counterattacks: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.10736.pdf . But, on top of these defenses (the counterattacks, the cooperative community of miners), we have two additional layers of defense: We have our latest code, version 0.17.3, which includes RCF – Rolling Checkpoint Finalization. Release notes:
https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/wiki/Release-Notes-v0.17.3
Simply put, the RCF means that most blocks that are more than 9 or 10 blocks are considered “final” – they cannot be rolled back. Full details are in the release notes. This now prevents all deep-chain reversions – that 1325 block monster can’t happen any more.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Is this already running on the mainnet?
Edward Iskra: This is why most exchanges have re-opened their wallets for BTG. Yes, on any given day, between 95% and 100% of blocks mined come from pools that are already using 0.17.3. (Some blocks come from solo miners or unknown pools, and we can’t know what version they use.)
h4x3rotab: Btw you can find the costs to perform 51% attack at a website called crypto51.
Serg | Satoshi Club: you had some problems with that in the past?
Edward Iskra: Sure – there were well-publicized attacks on BTG in May of 2018, after which we changed our algo in defense, and a well-publicized attack in Jan of 2020 which affected at least one exchange – Binance. But Binance has re-opened their wallets after the monster 1325 block attack.
Actually, when their attack initially failed, that attacker kept mining – they mined it out to 1423 blocks long before giving up. Almost a full day after they released the chain!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: that’s very interesting
Edward Iskra: But on top ofthis, we are developing the next level of defense: CCBN.
Cross Chain Block Notarization. I believe it may be the first fully decentralized protocol for using notarization to prevent 51% attacks.
With CCBN, it would be extremely difficult for an attacker to make an attack which is as long as 6 blocks.
With CCBN and RCF, a 6-block attack is virtually impossible.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Can you elaborate a bit? What is notarization?
Edward Iskra: Notarization is basically the same as the definition of the word – it’s a notation of what is “proper” into some place that you can later check to verify. Most notarization schemes need an authority to tell you what’s proper – a “Notary.” But CCBN does not. How do we pull that off?
The notarization is the full BTG block header.
When we write the full block header into another blockchain, then ANYBODY can validate the header themselves, just like the blocks on-chain. This way, we don’t need anyone to be the Authority. Basically, BTG blocks will be Notarized to well-known public blockchains which serve as our “Notarychains.” Notarizations gain Weight based on their depth in the Notarychain. Those made earlier gain Weight faster than those made later.
This is the basis for the defense.
When a competing chain of blocks (a fork) appears, BTG nodes with CCBN do not switch to the longer chain immediately.
Instead, they check the Notarychains to calculate Weight and will only switch to a longer chain that also has more Weight.
If a “natural” fork occurs and all blocks are Notarized, CCBN has no effect. There’s no change to normal PoW (Nakamoto Consensus.). If your readers are clever, they’ll ask… but what if the attacker simply notarized the blocks they are secretly mining?
The answer there is simple: when they publicly notarize, the ‘secret’ is lost. All the exchanges can see the attack blocks getting notarized, and they close their wallets. So there’s no ability to attack.
That’s the crux of the defense: an attacker can’t do a double-spend. If they hide their blocks, CCBN means they can’t do the fork. If they notarize their blocks, the exchange see them and don’t accept the deposit. In the end, double-spend becomes impossible.
Q3 from Telegram user @sai_sa
I’ve read on your platforms about your plans for Plasma mainchain and sidechan implementation. What is the advances to achieve this? what are their functions?
Edward Iskra: Ah – the Plasma world has been working hard to overcome certain limitation inherent to Plasma, but progress has been slow. We can’t advance Plasma on BTG faster than the Plasma world advances Plasma.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: So you don’t advance any estimations regarding this?
Edward Iskra: There are other sidechain solutions that can work with BTG, and we follow them – H4 may want to comment, here.
h4x3rotab: Yeah, there are some trends. First is that a few “rollup” solutions emerged, like ZK-rollup and optimisitc-rollup.
Edward Iskra: Yes, optimistic-rollup is interesting, but it make things probability based (optimistic) for some period of time. People don’t want to lock up their funds for several days in case of fraud.
h4x3rotab: The biggest difference between pure Plasma and rollup is about data availablity. Usually when you use a blockchain, you just run a wallet, whichi is a light client. So you don’t need to sotre the entire blockchain to use it. This is possible because there are hundreds of full nodes who are keeping the blockchain history for you. However for Plasma, because there could be a lot of sidechains. You can’t rely on just a few full nodes to keep your transactions and blockchain and validate it for you any more.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: ZK-rollup runs on ETH, right?
h4x3rotab: Yeah, it’s a kind of blockchain scaling technology and can be apply to most blockchains. So in rollup technology, you store the input of your transaction on the mainchain, but let the layer2 to process it. The mechanism could vary, but they basically guarantee the correctness of the out-sourced computation. That’s why you don’t need to rely on a specific gourp of people to keep your transaction and blockchain data.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Is this scaling solution actively used? Or it’s like a prototype?
h4x3rotab: It’s already used, not very popular though. Actually optimistic-rollup is a modified version of Plasma and it’s very similar.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Why is it not popular? Seems to solve a very important problem.
h4x3rotab: It has some technical limitation. For example the rollup solutions are all hard to interoperate. But it also leads to another trend I just want to mention
Edward Iskra: It is popular, but it’s still early. Epicenter did a podcast a few months ago with Want & Floersch on Optimism – I recommend it for those interested.
But it’s not perfect – it can still lock up funds for days or a week (depending on design). That’s not an attractive limitation.
But work continues among the Plasma specialists, and we follow closely. But Plasma is not the only sidechain – either the BTG team or some outside dev group will surely implements a sidechain onto BTG in the next year or two. I’m also following the OmniLayer project – it has developed a new version this year, funded by Tether. There’s an independent Dev who already ported Omni to BTG; they may find BTG is a less expensive chain for their purposes (it costs less than a penny to write a TX on BTG – what’s the fee to write on chains like BTC and ETH?)
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Fees are crazy lately
h4x3rotab: Another trend is about cross-chain interoperability. You know now you can trade BTC on ETH DeFi apps via some two-way pegged token (by both centralized and decentralized solutions). By connecting blockchains together, it’s also a new way to distribute the workload and bring more extensibility to the blockchains. Why must we have “mainchains” and “sidechains” rather than just connecting the blockchains in the same level?
Edward Iskra: Exactly.
But side-chains and cross-chain projects will always be wary when there are attacks like the ones we recently saw – that’s why our focus is on improving the safety, first, to keep the chain very stable.
RCF: done
CCBN: in progress
With these two in place, BTG becomes a very attractive base chain. (And we have more improvements in mind to come next.)
Q4 from Telegram user @man_sisokovic
Every project requires funds to function and to inovate. Where do you get the funds to function and for how long you still have enough to function properly?
Edward Iskra: We started out by mining a 100,000 BTG endowment in the first 8000 blocks mined as BTG – the first BTG block was 491407 in 2017. But, as you all know, by 2018, we had a Crypto Winter. 🙁 🙁 🙁
The team chose to go into “Austerity” mode to preserve the Endowment as long as possible. We spend very, very little – most work is done by volunteers, and we work hard to minimize costs.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: You still have an office? Or everything happens online?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: All the progress is done online as we are on different continents
Edward Iskra: I’m happy to say, however, that we still have a significant fraction of the Endowment – 42901 BTG right now.
You can see this, live, any time, here:
https://h4x3rotab.github.io/btg-transparent/
That’s fully described here:
https://bitcoingold.org/btg-transparent-a-live-balance-page-for-the-btg-endowment/
Serg | Satoshi Club: any plans to attract additional funds in the future?
Edward Iskra: Our 3rd anniversary is comping up, and in conjunction with that, we’re opening up a Donations page.
We will have multiple donation addresses so that donors can specific which projects they want to fund.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: When is the anniversary?
Edward Iskra: There will be an address to fund the CCBN project, another to find our Ambassadors group, another to fund giveaways, for continued Core Wallet development, etc.
This way, people can contribute, but they can also “direct” the project with their contributions.
Serg | Satoshi Club: you want to send a present? 🙂
Edward Iskra: Well, the BTG fork-copy was on October 25, 2017… and the first BTG block was mined November 2017.
It’s hard to say, exactly. Want to call it November 1st?
(I think of it as November 12, 2017, when block 491407 was mined – the first BTG block.)
Serg | Satoshi Club: wish you many fruitful years 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: So almost 2 months. :blush:. Big party scheduled?
Edward Iskra: Don’t forget – anyone who held any Bitcoin in block 491406, no matter how long ago they acquired it, held that some number of coins in BTG as of BTG block 491407.
There are lost of people out there still holding their BTG from pre-fork days!
Serg | Satoshi Club: I also have some from that moment btw 🙂
Q5 from Telegram user @albert3990
I have been a trader for 10 years and I see that btg, through a graphical analysis, is in a long-term downtrend. What is the team doing to generate value for the holders and to reverse this trend?
Edward Iskra: The long-term downtrend is pronounced if you include the early days of BTG – but you have to remember that when BTG launched in late 2017, we were in the midst of the biggest crypto bubble that the space ever saw.
Those “opening values” are not really a solid basis; the bubble popped.
The following downtrend affected all alts, BTG included. Among the group of all alts, BTG has not really underperformed.
That said, we’re doing many things to keep the project moving forward – and to support the price. One key thing is the security, which we talked about before. People don’t build on a coin which is insecure, investors don’t invest in a coin which is insecure.
Fortunately, none of the attacks done with BTG were actually exploiting any flaw or insecurity within BTG’s code. They were exploiting the conventional 51% vector, which exists with all decentralized PoW coins.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: You can see the attacks as a good thing in this context :blush:
Proved the efficiency of the security in place
Edward Iskra: The work I described above – RCF, CCBN – enhances BTG’s security dramatically. It led to exchanges re-opening wallets despite the attack we’ve seen (1325 blocks!). This restores liquidity to the BTG space.
We expect this trend to continue… and, as people learn about our new security features, the attacks of the past will become advertising for the high security of the future. We are also supporting/building other aspects of the ecosystem, in partnership with others.
In the near future, we’re updating our explorers, which provide a full Insight API which 3rd parties use.
We’re also close to releasing a very-updated versionin of our ElectrumG wallet (based on Electrum.) This new version is more efficient, includes all the new Electrum features, and will support most hardware wallets, as well. (We’ve already tested beta builds interanlly; they are looking good.).And there are several Lightning implementation still progressing for BTG. There’s an lnd port that we’ve already done demos with, and ElectrumG has in-build lightning capability. i’m looking forward to seeing Lightning grow on BTG, too!
Serg | Satoshi Club: you give very informative answers 🙂
Edward Iskra: I guess the real answer to the trader’s question is this: we’re working hard on the core infrastructure and security, because that’s what we’ll all build on in the future. A strong foundation takes longer than we often would like – but it provides for the most stable future!
Q6 from Telegram user @konditer_rolex
What is BTG PAY and how is it implemented? Browser extension, app, credit cards?
Edward Iskra: BTG Pay isn’t a product; it’s a network which connects BTG consumers, BTG merchants, and BTG services. We know the name is a bit confusing for some – we’re not Apple Pay. 😉 We noticed early on that user wanted to spend BTG, they asked us where they can do this.
Merchants wanted to accept BTG; they asked us how to do this.
Service providers wanted to sell their BTG-processing services, they asked us how to reach Merchants.
BTG Pay was the name we gave to our work at connecting all of those groups with each other – because that’s what they need, to find each other.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: I see that you have integrations with a lot of ecommerce platforms. Any plans to add Shopify?
Edward Iskra: Yes; we welcome and support them all – and we don’t compete with services by providing our own, so it’s ripe territory.
We have not spoken with Shopify. Do you have a contact for me? 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: No, I don’t :blush:. But we wait for them to join blockchain and invite them here for an AMA
Serg | Satoshi Club: yes, they have to be related to crypto in order to be accepted for AMA 😁
Edward Iskra: Well, I’ll point out that BTG is supported by CoinPayments.net.And that’s selectable as a payment system for Shopify, so, technically, we’re usable on Shopify.
But I’d love to talk with Shopify directly, anyway.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I think I use coinbase for crypto payments on my eshop. I’ll look at coinpayments as well
Edward Iskra: Sadly, we’re not on Coinbase – or any other major US-based exchange. However, I’m confident that will change in the coming months.
We’re seeing a groundswell of support and interest, and the exchanges love to see that.
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram user @adityaaryah
How easy is BTG mining, is it complicated like BTC mining, what are the requirements?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: https://bitcoingold.org/for-miners/ please check that @adityaaryah
Q2 from Telegram user @K2ice
I have a zeal to become an ambassador for Bitcoin Gold. As an African, am I welcome on board? And is there any special feature for me to have to become an ambassador?
Edward Iskra:Fantastic! Our Ambassador group is headed up by Richard Boappiah, who is also from Africa. You can hit him up in the BTG Telegram channel for more info. Some featured Ambassadors are here: https://bitcoingold.org/ambassadors-list/
We look forward to seeing this program grow with the contributions of individuals all around the world, just like you!
Q3 from Telegram user @starkyiv
Which Bitcoin Gold is using the mechanism to counter a possible 51% attack?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: We are right now developing an algorithms which is called CCBN or Crosschain block notarization you may read more here – https://bitcoingold.org/ccbn/
Q4 from Telegram user @Kargil1999
Recently
You guys announced the release of BTG core wallet, Can You talk more
about it?
What main features does it have & Why should Users
use it?
Edward Iskra: The BTG Core Wallet is much more than a wallet – it’s a BTG Full Node. If you run it, you are also validating all transactions and blocks on the blockchain, and you are relaying them on the BTG network.
Running the core wallet strengthens the network, making it fast, more reliable, and more secure for everyone.
The BTG Core wallet was the first piece of software we released, it was necessary to begin the BTG blockchain. It will continue to be updated regularly.
Q5 from Telegram user @Johana0012
I
would be scared if the information was hacked. What mechanism does
Bitcoin Gold use to protect data privacy?
Does the Bitcoin Gold
chain have the skills and experience necessary to produce a project
with high standards?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: We are using latest encrypting standards (the same as Bitcoin) and the algorithm for signing transactions and using private keys is ECDSA (again the same as Bitcoin). The only problem that we may face is when the computers are so strong so they can brute-force a private key, but even when that becomes a real thread we are having really good engineers on our side that will take good action.
Q6 from Telegram user @surendra040
Can you tell us why there has been delisting on some exchanges of BTG.Is there anything we investors need to worry about?
Edward Iskra: Exchanges make their own choices and are very competitive – they need to focus their resources. If they have markets with low trade volume, they may delist.
That being said, I have no fear of any major exchanges (in terms of BTG volume) delisting at this time. HitBTC, Bitfinex, Binance, OKEx, we believe they are fine.
Some exchanges may make hasty decisions as a result of the recent attacks – but, as you’ve see here, we’ve addressed those concerns. CEX falls into this category; we had not heard a word from them until we heard they intended to delist BTG.
I hope they may reverse their decision if they look at all we’ve done, and I’m working to get that information to them.
Q7 from Telegram user @BJosefina61
Some consider that the best decentralization should be based on CPU and not GPU. What is your opinion? why GPU only?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: CPU can also be used for mining BTG, it is just not efficient. You can even mine BTG using your phone as our mining algorithm is available as a framework on most of the platforms. If we go to energy efficiency of CPUs it may lead to creation of ASIC miners that mine BTG, which in my opinion is going to be a threat to the decentralization that BTG currently is providing. Also the hashing power that we have right now is proving that there are thousands and thousands of people who are contibuting to the stability and decentralization of BTG network.
Q8 from Telegram user @Rosane1a8
Bitcoin Gold wants to make BTC decentralized again. In which part of its path do you think Bitcoin lost its decentralized origin? Which features remain in Bitcoin gold and make it more decentralized?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: ASIC miners are mainly produced and used by a centralized company, which at some point IMO put BTC chain in danger as it was claimed that a single entity is holding the most of the mining power in BTC. Moreover that company may decide to stop selling machines and keep them all for themself so they have control over the network, which will be a big problem for decentralization. Therefore we have started the project BTG so it is a fully functional version of BTC which is completelly decentralized
Q9 from Telegram user @Tony253210
Have you considering the creation of a special Wallet to hold and mine BTG ? Maybe a webwallet and then a Mobile version too?
Martin Kuvandzhiev: You can use our BTG Core as a full or pruned node and also a wallet – https://bitcoingold.org/downloads/
Also we have a verion of Electrum Wallet called ElectrumG – https://bitcoingold.org/electrumg/
Moreover you can use any of our participants in the ecosystem listed here – https://bitcoingold.org/ecosystem/
Q10 from Telegram user @Dyibala123
My question is about the ZK-rollup. Is it possible to apply this technologya to most blockchains or is it limited to only ETH?
h4x3rotab: Of coures it can apply to all the blockchains as long as they can add the support. Besides rollup, other layer2 solutions like Lighting Network are also very effective scaling solutions. Bitcoin Gold have a working Lightning Network on testnet. And we will release it on mainnet when it’s fully tested.
Q11 from Telegram user @CryptoLover97
What
was The Need For Forking BTC to Create BTG ? Advantages of Creating
BTG ?
Edward Iskra: BTC was becoming more and more centralized because of ASICs. Almost all ASICS were made by one manufacturer, and most BTC mining was done in warehouses of ASICs in China.
“Regular people” didn’t have thousands of dollars to buy an ASIC, assuming they could even get one shipped to their country – insiders appeared to be getting all the new stock.
And there was a war raging within BTC – this was the time of the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash split. Developers disagreed with miners about what should be done, and the miners had most of the ASICs and had a lot of power.
Too much power, we thought. BTC used to be mined on GPUs before ASICs – and, before that, was mined on CPUs. It was One CPU, One Vote on the blockchain.
BTG tries to restore that early balance – with a GPU-centric algorithm, you’re free of “special” hardware. Anyone can buy a GPU.
With BTG, anyone can mine again. You can be a full-fledged part of the system.
The other thing BTG did was show that you can fork BTC without attacking BTC. We did not compete for BTC hashpower, we never claimed to be the “real Bitcoin,” but we showed that it’s possible to make changes and even hardforks successfully. BTG conduced a successful hardfork ourselves in 2018 to change our mining algo to thwart attackers and to prevent new ASICs from mining on BTG. And BTG will hardfork again in the future – perhaps to thrwart ASICs again, or perhaps to introduce valuable new features. The point is that, unlike BTC, we are small and nimble and can do hardforks when necessary and appropriate, without enormous contention and feuds. (Oops.)
Serg | Satoshi Club: Thank for joining our AMA! we hope you enjoyed it 🙂
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Thank you guys :blush: It was really interesting
Edward Iskra: Thank you, everyone, for hosting and participating. It was an honor and a pleasure to participate.
Part 3 – Quiz Results
In the final part we would like you to check your knowledge in terms of Bitcoin Gold. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part, so everyone could be a part and answer. All the correct answers you will find at the bottom of this Recap. Enjoy!
Q1
Since it was created as a fork of Bitcoin, the first block in the BTG blockchain is dated from…
Q2
What
do I need to run a BTG Full Node?
Q3
How quickly are transactions processed on BTG?
Q4
What do I need to mine BTG?
Answers
1. (1) 2009 – every historical block in BTC before block number 491407 is within the BTG chain
2. (4) A full node is lightweight. It even runs on Raspberry Pi!
3. (4) Transactions propagate in seconds. They are later mined into blocks which confirm them. You should not trust high-value transactions without confirmations, but the transactions are very quick.
4. (1) All you need is a supported graphics card. Many will work!
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