In an attempt to shed more light on a project many consider to be lacking in detail, the development team announced a campaign of daily updates. Replay Protection Fully Implemented is the first installment. After a bumpy roll-out and widespread criticism regarding the project’s supposed secrecy, Bitcoin Gold’s development team has taken to daily updates in an effort to help push the project along.
Bitcoin Gold Reveals Daily Update Blog
“In order to ensure the safety of the Bitcoin ecosystem”, the statement began, “Bitcoin Gold has implemented full replay protection, an essential feature that protects users’ coins from being spent unintentionally.”
One concern during a hard fork, is that of transactions being accepted along both chains, causing confusion and, in some cases, outright fraud.
To answer those worries, Bitcoin Gold “has just implemented a solution called SIGHASH_FORK_ID replay protection”, the update continues. “It is an effective two-way replay protection mechanism that enforces a new algorithm to calculate the hash of a transaction so that all new Bitcoin transactions will be invalid on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain and vice versa.”
The update then points to a Github link for greater detail.
“This makes replaying transactions impossible”, the team claims.”Replay protection is a safety feature that makes sure that transactions on one chain are invalid on the other chain, thus preventing transaction replay and the possible resulting loss of funds”, they reiterate.
Next Steps
The team asserts mainnet deployment will happen after services such as an official mining guide, blockchain explorer, web forum, and wallet guide are offered.
Immediate next steps include: “Launch public testnet notification through Slack; Adjust network parameters; Prepare for mainnet launch; Deploy mainnet; Electrum fork; 3rd party Wallets and Exchanges integration; Decentralized mining”, though no dates were given and no timetable was suggested.
The post then concludes with a mission-statement of sorts, guiding principles under which the team is set to operate.
“Bitcoin Gold is a community-led project to create a hard fork of Bitcoin to a new proof-of-work algorithm to make Bitcoin mining decentralized again”, they state. “Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for countless new people around the world to participate in the mining process”, the team declares. Time will tell.