Bitcoin Gold [BTG] to be delisted from Bittrex, declines to repay stolen coins from the BTG chain

Recently, Bittrex, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange requested Bitcoin Gold [BTG], a distributed digital currency to pay up 12,372K in BTG as a result of a double spending attack made on the BTG chain within the exchange platform. Bitcoin Gold decided not to accede to the request and as a consequence will be delisted from Bittrex starting from 14th September.

According to Bittrex, the delisting would comprise of all Bitcoin Gold pairings including BTC/BTG, ETH/BTG, and USDT/BTG. In an official statement released on their website, Bitcoin Gold said:

“We regret to inform our community that the crypto exchange Bittrex has decided to de-list BTG after we declined to pay them 12,372 BTG to remain listed.”

The 51% attack in question was made on the Bitcoin Gold network on 19th May wherein hackers were able to take control of more than 51 percent of the overall hash power effectively stealing 388,000 BTG [about $18 million] from the Bittrex platform. This method of attack involves continuously fooling an exchange into transferring more digital currency than what is required.

Bittrex maintains that they have already paid a portion of the lost currency from their BTG reserves and have requested Bitcoin Gold to pay up for the rest of the lost digital currency totaling about 6000 BTG.

However, Bitcoin Gold in their statement informed the cryptocurrency community that the reason the digital currency platform has not made the payment is due to the fact that they have no revenue streams. Since BTG is a non-profit organization, all the BTG mining rewards go only to the miners and about half of their endowment fund is time-locked for future use. Bitcoin Gold said:

“We offered a BTG loan from the Endowment to help Bittrex address short-term liquidity problems, but they declined and insisted on a payment.”

Bitcoin Gold further maintains that their team is not responsible for security policies that exist in private organizations such as Bittrex as it these organizations themselves who must manage risks that appear on their platforms. Bitcoin Gold believes that the final responsibility and security should ultimately be taken up by private businesses like Bittrex.

Bitcoin in their final statement said:

“We feel it’s clear that we took every reasonable step to try to help ensure Bittrex’s safety against this threat. All our exchange partners can rest assured we will continue to work to assist them whenever possible, and that we will continue to work towards improvements which will increase safety in the crypto space.”

The delisting is said to not affect the Bitcoin Gold ecosystem significantly as Bittrex was never Bitcoin Gold’s topmost liquidity provider in terms of volume, in the past couple of months. Bitcoin Gold’s current dominant exchanges include Bithumb, HitBTC,  Bitfinex, Binance, and Bitinka.

A Redditor named T3mpt3mp commented:

“With $1Billion from the scam ICO, there is no ‘try’… I don’t understand how anyone could give them any slack when they literally made $1B and all it is, is a centralized database. Literally. A fucking database.”

Another Redditor named GrimmReaperBG added:

 “When a coin is finally delisted from exchanges like Bittrex and Cryptopia, then you know for sure it’s hit rock bottom.”

AXTurbo, another Reddit user said:

“May many more shit coins get what shit coins deserve – rekt.”