We are now 12+ hours into the launch of BitCoin Gold (BTG) and we have seen only a single market trading shares of the coin. Why you ask? Poloniex had this to say about BTG.
NOTICE ABOUT BITCOIN GOLD
We have received inquiries about Bitcoin Gold and whether we intend to support it. Until the software is released for review, we cannot commit to distribution nor can we pledge to support it. The reason for this is that we cannot be certain about the security and stability of the software, nor the state or health of the network prior to launch. Further, regardless of what the project team behind the new token may assert to the exchanges prior to launch, we must be confident that a blockchain token does not require dangerous and questionable activities in order to support it.
We've stated in the past that the safety of our users' tokens is our chief concern. As such, we have refused to support a forked token unless it had implemented replay protection. We would like to further urge our users to be immensely cautious of any token that expects to be given private keys that control value on another blockchain. This is dangerous and unnecessary, even for an alt like BTG that seeks to distribute tokens using the state of an existing blockchain.
Some reminders that apply to all balance-duplicating alts:
If you wish to be guaranteed tokens distributed according to existing blockchain address balances, you should keep your tokens in addresses for which you control the private keys.
If we credit accounts with forked tokens, we will do so according to balances at the time of the fork. If you have tokens on loan at the time of any fork related to that token, they are not in your balance, therefore you will not receive any forked tokens for them.
Under no circumstances will we redeem tokens distributed according to the balances of addresses that contain customer funds and keep them for ourselves. Should we redeem them, we would only do so to distribute them to our users.
- The Poloniex Team
When you dive a little deeper into the roots and code of the system available here: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU the first thing you should notice is no precompiled link to a wallet of any type even post snapshot of BTC.
Later down if you visit the Trello page which is utilized for development tracking it appears to be massively incomplete: https://trello.com/b/P1rLw1G9/bitcoin-gold-todos
Is this potentially one of the largest attempts to manipulate the grandfather of coins by creating a phantom GPU version in the wake of the success of Bitcoin Cash ?
Time will tell won't it. But for now I have nothing invested time or financially into BTG and I intend to keep it that way until the signs show otherwise.
-IceBurst