Bitcoin Gold Daily Update – Day 1 of Testnet

Hello everybody!

It was a long day and even longer night for the team of Bitcoin Gold on the start the official testnet. We targeted this test launch of the network to the pool providers and the miners as one of the vast changes in BTG is the PoW algorithm. We are really excited to share that more than 19000 people and more than 31000 mining machines participated in the first hour of test mining on the pools supporting BTG. Based on the results that the network provided for the last 15 hours we can conclude that the first step to the launch of the testnet is successful and that the PoW change is working as expected.

Actions required:

We have seen that the difficulty starts too low and the block time is less than 5 seconds for the first 500 blocks and needed 15 hours to reach to 7 minutes. That is why we are rising the difficulty network start and will also adapt the difficulty change algorithm based on the data that we have observed. We have found that some nodes cannot connect to the network, the solution is already applied. DNSSeeds seem not to connect to provide node network information. We will investigate further this problem and apply a fix immediately. For now all of the pool operators and people that wants to connect to the network can use as a manually connected nodes : eunode.pool.gold and asianode.pool.gold . Because of the low difficulty we have observed large percent of orphan blocks and a lot of rejected shares. As we apply the difficulty fix, this will stop immediately.

Next steps:

On 11/02/2017 at 2 PM UTC we will do a restart of the test network. All of the mined block will be invalidated and everything will start from block 1210320. That way we are simulating the start of the main net and we can observe in detail how our blockchain works. We will request all the people to execute the following actions in order to connect to the new network *if you are not running the latest software*:

bgold-cli getinfo # that way you will check on which block are you. If block >= 1210320 execute steps 2, 3 else go to 4 bgold-cli getblockhash 1210320 # the result from this is used in 3. *please stop here* if the result is 00005a7a2f2b6b85ed6735d571cae7a2ce2fce898964376e77662c69aa739f49 bgold-cli invalidateblock <#result from 2.> bgold-cli stop # go to your BTCGPU folder git pull origin master make clean && make bgoldd -testnet -daemon -reindex -addnode=eunode.pool.gold -addnode=asianode.pool.gold Wallet provider support for BTG integration.

Thanks for all of the support!

Bitcoin Gold team