Hello everybody!

Here is the first daily update on Bitcoin Gold development. We have decided that this is best way for everyone to stay up to date with all the important development progress that is taking place. These updates may not happen literally every day, but we will aim for at least three to four updates per week.

  1. Replay protection
    We have spent several hours on the pull request for replay protection: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/55. This method of replay protection is sufficient to keep all transactions safe from replay attacks, and we are very likely to merge this pull request in the upcoming days. In addition to that pull request, we received another pull request from an anonymous contributor for a different implementation of replay protection: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/83. We will award him or her the bounty because the code meets the requirements originally described in the bounty: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/issues/51.  We are very encouraged with the success our bounty program has already achieved in the very early days of this project.
  2. Unique Address Format
    H4x has decided that Bitcoin Gold addresses must start with the letters G and A in order to clearly distinguish from Bitcoin addresses, which start with 1 and 3. We hope this measure will prevent people from mistakenly sending coins on the wrong side of the fork. Moreover, in the wallets supporting BTG there must be a safety feature that doesn’t let people send money to incorrect wallets. The pull request is going to be merged today: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/80.
  3. Testnet
    Martin has spent most of his time working on the testnet. Currently the main problem is that the flags for initial sync never get to a completed state, because the way the Bitcoin Gold client is currently made is to be able to sync the pre-fork legacy blockchain from the Bitcoin nodes. We think this is the best way to make sure that we are providing the best connection to everyone. But the unfortunate consequence of this method is that the height shown in the legacy BTC nodes is much higher than the height of the BTG fork. So we are currently implementing a logic to protect from this.
  4. Other
    A lot of people are asking various questions about the Bitcoin Gold dev process and the way BTG works, and we put great efforts to answer all of them.
    We have a lot of time wasted by people who are publishing “hate” topics with attacks on Bitcoin Gold, and the only way to refute the claims is to provide facts. Each claim shall be based on facts, if there are no facts presented, it is just a derogatory attack. We are doing our best to provide stable and secure solution for everyone, to support all the mining pools, the wallet providers, and the exchanges.

All the Bitcoin Gold Team is working hard and we are confident in the success of Bitcoin Gold.