The people behind Bitcoin Gold project attempted to provide some clarity about the origins of the Bitcoin Gold blockchain and especially to shed enough light to the whole “premine” debate which has raised a lot of eyebrows as well as negative remarks.
According to the project’s official announcement, the project indeed mined 100,000 coins (8,000 blocks at 12.5 coins per block) after the hard fork at block height 491,407 which happened on 2017-10-24 01:20:39 UTC. At the time of the hard fork, there were 16.5 million bitcoins (BTC) issued. Thus, given the fact that Bitcoin Gold replicates the entire Bitcoin blockchain up to the point of the hard fork, 16.5 million Bitcoin Gold coins appeared out of the nowhere.
After the hard fork, the Bitcoin Gold project went on a “brief project mining period to build a store of coins to support the future of the project”. That store of coins equals to 100,000 coins, we are told.
The announcement clarifies that this mining period was not a premine, but “it’s more of a post-mine”. It is explained that “a true pre–mine is when the makers of coin start a new blockchain with a genesis block and do private mining to accumulate a number of coins, and only then make mining public for others earn coin rewards. With that approach, the makers obviously start out with a huge proportion of the initial coin supply – 100%! That’s would have been a serious problem.”
Bitcoin Gold project apparently did not do that, as 16.5 million of BTG were instantly created from their BTC equivalents. The 100K coins accumulated during the premine aka post-mine period was about 0,6% of the total number of outstanding coins, a number they see as “a tiny fraction”. And they are right in saying this, as the rest of the 16,5 million BTG are in the hands of whoever held the corresponding bitcoins at the time of the fork.
Summing up the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold supplies:
Where will the premined BTG go? To An Endowment!
Bitcoin Gold’s team tries hard to negate circulating rumors that they would dump the premined coins soon after launch.
The code which ran the premine was putting all those coins into “locked” wallets, even as they were being mined.
According to the announcement, "100% of the coins mined during the premine period were mined directly into multi-signature wallets which cannot be disbursed by any one individual, or even a small group. All disbursements must be signed by four of the six core team members. Further, 60% of those coins were mined into time-locked wallets which cannot be accessed immediately; they become accessible over the course of the next three years."
Bitcoin Gold developers also welcomes anyone who is technically proficient to verify the aforementioned claims. In their words, “the fact that 60% of the premine is time-locked for three years can be seen here; that code segment also shows that the rest of the premine went into multi-signature wallets. The fact that this code is enforced in the consensus rules can be seen here.”
Moreover, 95% of these premined coins were locked up in a scheme the project calls similar to an Endowment: “Some (35%) was potentially available for use immediately, and 60% was locked up for the future. The purpose of these funds is to support the growth and maintenance of a healthy ecosystem for Bitcoin Gold, but also to support Bitcoin and the crypto-community generally.”
The team acknowledges the fuzz regarding the rest 5% of the premine which was earmarked as “Initial reward for core team” in the Roadmap. They say that it equals to 5,000 coins which was used “to cover all the costs for the team, infrastructure, development and bounties and they were all covered by the core team”.
Finally, the project says it will be releasing more info about the Endowment soon. Stay tuned in JustCryptonews.com to read the latest bitcoin gold news.
What do you think? Did the Bitcoin Gold team manage to clarify the whole premine situation?