Bitcoin Gold Community Library¶
Welcome to the curated documentation for the Bitcoin Gold community.
This site is not a fork of the BTCGPU wiki. It is a curated, opinionated set of guides based on the canonical sources in BTCGPU/BTCGPU and BTCGPU/BTCGPU.wiki, supplemented by tested reference configurations.
Found an error?
Email admin@bitcoingold.services or join the official Bitcoin Gold Discord and report it to the community.
How to use this library¶
Pick the track that matches your role:
- Transparency — BTG Endowment details, premine wallets, on-chain verification.
- Operators — running infrastructure (full node, DNS seeder, Electrum server, Blockbook indexer, mining pool).
- Developers — building wallets, atomic swaps, RPC integration, building from source.
- Users — setting up a wallet, securing funds, recovering from the 2018 incident.
- Security — hardening a host that runs any of the above.
Each guide assumes you already know how to use a Linux shell. None of them is a beginner's intro to Bitcoin.
Curriculum¶
| Track | Course | What you'll build/learn |
|---|---|---|
| Transparency | BTG Endowment transparency | Verify 100,000 BTG premine on-chain. |
| Operators | Full node | A bgoldd full node serving P2P on 8338. |
| Operators | DNS seeder | A sipa-seeder instance crawling the network. |
| Operators | Electrum server | An ElectrumX instance for Bitcoin Gold. |
| Operators | Blockbook indexer | A Blockbook instance serving the address-index API. |
| Operators | Mining pool basics | An Equihash-BTG pool with Miningcore. |
| Developers | Developer guide | Wallets, atomic swaps, RPC, building from source. |
| Users | Wallet setup | Bitcoin Gold Core, ElectrumG, hardware wallets. |
| Security | Hardening | ufw, fail2ban, SSH keys, systemd sandboxing. |
Reference¶
- Network specification — magic bytes, ports, and Equihash-BTG parameters.
- Ports reference — every port you might need to open.
- RPC cheatsheet — the most useful
bgold-clicalls. - Release history — every Bitcoin Gold release and the upgrade headlines.
- Notable security incidents — the 2018 Windows installer attack, the 2020 reorg attempt, the 2024 domain hijack.
- Glossary — terms used throughout the library.
Conventions¶
- Versions: examples target
bgolddv0.17.3 unless stated otherwise. v0.17.3 is the widely-deployed stable (released 2020-08-01). v0.21.3-beta is the current codebase but marked prerelease on GitHub and less deployed. - Ports: mainnet P2P is 8338 (not 8333). Testnet v3 P2P is 18338. RPC is 8332 on mainnet, 18332 on testnet, localhost only.
- Path: the canonical config path for
bgolddis/var/lib/bitcoingold/.bitcoingold/bitcoingold.conf. - Shell: every command-line example uses
bashand assumessudois available. - Address examples:
GYf8nyo1c8oWsHzbvL1fD3Ckgg68UzBi5J(do not send to this — it's a placeholder).
Language¶
- English at
/
Sources and contact¶
- Documentation: the published site is available at library.bitcoingold.services. Guides cite the relevant upstream BTCGPU repository and wiki sources.
- Contact: report documentation errors by email to admin@bitcoingold.services or through the official Bitcoin Gold Discord. See bitcoingold.services for additional community services.
Disclaimer¶
Running public Bitcoin Gold infrastructure exposes you to the public internet. Nothing in this library is a substitute for understanding what you are running, hardening it properly, and monitoring it. Read the Hardening course before exposing a service.