BTC Gold delisted over lack of 51% attack compensation

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The end of the line looms close for BTC Gold (BTG), after one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges has decided to delist the alt coin over its failure to pay the platform allowing it to retain the listing.

The team behind BTG announced over the weekend that Bittrex has decided to delist the alt coin after they did not pay the sum of 12,732 BTG, worth $265,000 in current trading price, as compensation following the infamous 51% attack in May, in which hackers managed to spirit away over 388,000 BTG.

The Seattle-based crypto exchange allegedly requested the amount from the BTG team “to cover the loss” it incurred following the double-spend attack last May 19. In fact, the amount stolen was around $18 million at the time since the BTG price was hovering around the $500 level and was stolen from a considerable number of operators including HitBTC, Bithumb, Binance, Bitinka, Bitfinex and the said Bittrex.

After BTG refused to “take responsibility for [their] chain,” Bittrex issued an ultimatum: pay 6,000 BTG or be delisted. The BTG team said they offered a loan from its “Endowment” to help Bittrex address the short-term liquidity problems, but the exchange declined.

“In light of the potential impact on the BTG community, our Board carefully considered their demand but concluded we are not empowered to make a disbursement from the Endowment for the purpose of covering a private company’s losses from their own security failures,” according to BTG team.

The team said it has done what it could to mitigate the risks following the 51% attack, including the exchanges like Bittrex the attacker’s wallet address, along with several pieces of advice and warnings.

“The [BTC] Gold team is not responsible for security policy within private entities like Bittrex; those who earn revenue running a private business must manage the related risks and are ultimately responsible for their own security,” according to the BTG team. “We suspect the impact Bittrex’s action on our ecosystem will not be substantial, as Bittrex has not been a top liquidity provider for BTG in recent months.”

BTG is a project led by Jack Liao of Hong Kong mining firm Lightning ASIC seeking to change the proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm and promising to enable common people to mine using ubiquitous, low-cost graphics cards. It’s worth noting, however, that this accessibility means attacking the system will also be cheap—which Dr. Craig Wright, chief scientist of the nChain Group, has previously pointed out.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.