Bitcoin Gold

Bitcoin Gold is one of the many proposed Bitcoin forks in recent months. It will be based on the current Bitcoin software, but it will be incompatible with it: you won’t be able to receive Bitcoin Gold in a Bitcoin wallet. The Bitcoin Gold fork is estimated to happen on 25 October 2017.

Will Luno support Bitcoin Gold?

As per our previous article, Luno’s position on Bitcoin forks, we have important things to consider when forks occur:

• the general adoption of the new fork on other platforms;
• the security of customer funds held with Luno; and that
• customers don’t lose out on any value associated with their funds.

The Bitcoin Gold code is not currently in a sufficiently secure state, there was a suspicious private premine of tokens, it does not adequately support two-way replay protection, and it isn’t publicly available for review and auditing by Luno or other developers. For these reasons, Luno won’t support Bitcoin Gold.

Most reputable international platforms have also signalled to not support Bitcoin Gold, due to these concerns.

What do you need to do?

You don’t need to do anything: your Bitcoin remains safe on Luno.

When Bitcoin Gold gets created, by forking from the main Bitcoin branch, those tokens will be securely held by Luno. We will not use or sell them. If Bitcoin Gold proves to be safe, supported and valuable in future, we’ll consider giving customers access to it at that stage. At this stage, it seems very unlikely.

If you decide to send your Bitcoin from Luno to other platforms, we encourage vigilance to protect yourself against Bitcoin scams.

What will Luno do?

We’ll continue to monitor the development of Bitcoin Gold (and other proposed forks). We don’t anticipate this fork to have any impact on the Bitcoin network or any of our operations. We’ll communicate any changes and updates to our customers.

Useful links:

• Luno’s position on Bitcoin forks
• Bitcoin Gold website