What You Need to Know About the Bitcoin Gold/GPU Hardfork on the 25th of October

In about 5 days, there will be a bitcoin hardfork which is changing the difficulty adjustment algorithm and also the mining algorithm in order to bring back GPU mining. This is a new chain, not the original chain and it will called bitcoin Gold/GPU (both names are being used at the moment but they are the same team.) There is still some question whether or not they would add complete replay protection in order to fully separate from the main chain, and it looks like they will.

If you are unaware of how forks work, any coins you own on the main bitcoin chain, will be available on the forked chain when it launches on the 25th. I would wait and see for an easy option to collect your GPU/Gold coins so you don’t have to do anything technical. This will probably take a few days but it will be worth it so you don’t accidentally screw things up and lose the coins. If you are wondering where to keep your coins, I would not keep them on exchanges unless they have specifically said they will support bitcoin gold.

At the moment hardware wallets such as ledger and trezor have said as long as they have good replay protection, they will provide a splitting tool so you will be able to claim your coins. There will be many people dumping coins on day one that you might want to hold on for a bit of a support to form. We saw this happen with almost every fork in the past. There does seem to be a slight premine, which will most likely come from the new generated coins, but also it could just come from the coins that end up not being claimed like satoshi’s coins.

The dev team is said to be a few people, some in China who cant access github, but commits on the actual code are being done by one person. This isn’t exactly a mainstream fork and many people are weary of even going through the hassle of getting the btc gold coins. They will most likely not be worth anything in comparison to the bitcoin cash forked coins that we saw a few months ago, just because there is not much of a support. However that being said, if you are looking to sell for a bit more bitcoin, it cant hurt.

I think the most important thing you should do is wait and let other people claim their coins first. You might not get the most amount of money if you try to sell them, but you also wont have the large amount of risk that comes with a relatively unknown project. I wish I could tell you more, but even being so close to launch, we really don’t know much. The team has been relatively quiet and while updates are occurring slowly, they are mostly just off their website at http://btcgpu.org/ I recommend taking things slow for this fork and make sure the replay protection that was promised, comes to fruition and the devs aren’t looking to scam people, ect.

Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges