The world of cryptocurrency allows us many opportunities to get free money as we've seen recently with the Bitcoin Cash hardfork. However, it's important to realise that there are pitfalls that need to be avoided in order to keep your coins safe.
Bitcoin Cash was successfully launched by a well organised team and now, 3 months later, the resulting currency has stabilized to what seems to be a fair value of around $325.
This is, however, not the case with Bitcoin Gold. The split, which occured yesterday has been fraught with issues, the most notable of which is the DDOS (denial of service) attack which brought down the BTG website.
If you look a little deeper into the problems however, you'll find that there are some glaring issues with Bitcoin Gold. Firstly it is rumoured the coins will be premined by the developers which seems to point at BTG being a scam from the start.
Most importantly though is that the coin launched with an incomplete codebase and the most important thing of all is that it lacks replay protection. Here is a brief description of the importance of replay protection.
Replay protection prevents a transaction on the Bitcoin Gold chain from being re-transmitted on the Bitcoin chain and vice versa. As Bitcoin Gold is a fork of Bitcoin, the transaction format, the signatures, etc. are the same. A transaction on one chain could be copied to the other chain and will be valid, possibly leading to unintended loss of coins.
In other words, if BTG does not have replay protection, spending on one chain will cause you to send the same amount of coins on the other chain. Even after the fork, spending BTC can lead to loss of BTG and vice versa.
Trezor (maker of hardware wallets)
https://blog.trezor.io/trezor-statement-on-bitcoin-gold-fork-78cebc0532c7
With this in mind, please be careful with your Bitcoins. Do not allow the promise of free money to jeopardize your crypto savings.
Thanks for reading
@deimus