Thanks @ivanli that was a very helpful shallow dive into Bitcon Gold.

My opinion is that it is a good idea to try and change the Bitcoin mining algorithm to something more decentralised, but in many respects "The horse has already bolted" for Bitcoin and the implementation here seems to be a bit amateurish. As is often the case, good technical people have great ideas but can be poor on the change management front and this is no exception.

The premine is certainly very interesting and I do wonder how long it will take to mine 16000 blocks on the low difficulty. Hours maybe days? With a block reward at 12.5 my math says the evil cat is probably collecting 200,000 BTG for their efforts, which is certainly clever. BTG only needs to be worth $10 after the fork at that's a cool $2 million in the pocket.

So my instinct is that this is an opportunistic move and may have some implementation risk. My opinion is that BTG is probably not going to be taken too seriously and is probably just a free-shitcoin airdrop that everyone will forget about by November.