Guide to claim Bitcoin Gold from Electrum, step 4: set up your new $BTG on Coinomi
The first thing you need to do is to create a new wallet and make it Bitcoin Gold compatible.
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Hit “create new wallet”, carefully write down your recovery phrase, which is another expression for seed words. These can be used to restore your wallet.
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Add a strong password, make sure you are in full control of the password and seed words.
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Now go ahead and create a Bitcoin Gold only wallet. Do not check Bitcoin or any other coins in the process due to possible conflicts on what the private keys we will import may stand for.
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Now you have an exclusive Bitcoin Gold wallet so go ahead and click on Bitcoin Gold on your Coinomi dashboard and go to the “Balance” tab.
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There we will click on Sweep wallet and begin the magic moment of importing (sweeping) the private keys we obtained earlier.
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You will see a window prompting you to type or scan your private keys for your $BTG which coincidentally are the now empty private keys for your older Bitcoin addresses.
While in general typing private keys on a hot machine (online) is not a good idea, I don’t see how else we could perform this operation otherwise. Luckily, your principal store of value, Bitcoin, is already moved to a safe and sound location.
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Go back and check one last time that all of the Bitcoin funds you moved in Step 2 to the new Electrum wallet have been confirmed. If not yet, just wait. There will be no going back for them.
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Copy the private keys you exported earlier into the field carefully.
From our experience and various people reporting on forums, not all of the individual addresses where you had BTC will generate $BTG on Coinomi. We will troubleshoot this later in this guide.
However, more often than not, error messages such as “The address has no funds” are very likely generated by transactions that were made post-snapshot that were consolidated on top of older Bitcoin funds in a single address on your old Electrum.
If that is the case, then you will not get to claim Bitcoin Gold from the private keys corresponding to those addresses.
Guide to claim Bitcoin Gold from Electrum, step 5 (optional): clean up
It’s not recommended to hold on to your BlueStacks install on your desktop / laptop. It’s a major resource hog, it’s intrusive and unnecessary if you are not planning to actively use your Coinomi wallet frequently.
The best way to further secure your claimed Bitcoin Gold is to leave it alone and just write down your receive addresses where newly minted $BTG have been generated, as well as a new receive address you might wanna use to receive funds.
Don’t worry too much about keeping this a secret.
This is especially true for the emulated Coinomi app since it now lives fully decrypted on your desktop, relying only on the supposed security measures one would take with a tablet or smartphone.
To make sure your funds are intact, just use one of the recently launched Bitcoin Gold blockchain explorers like BTG Explorer and search for any of the addresses where $BTG have been generated to check for integrity.
You can also install Coinomi on a genuine Android device, regenerate the wallet we’ve just created using your recovery phrase / seed words and just keep on using it since it’s a pretty safe and easy to use app for frequent minor cryptocurrency buying and selling.
Alternatively, you can always just send your new $BTG to an exchange right away to do any sort of trading you feel you are ready to do. Binance is a good first choice.
Guide to claim Bitcoin Gold from Electrum, step 6 (optional): troubleshooting
Your Electrum wallet has been compromised / corrupted by the export / import of private keys
Also called a “Replay attack”, this possibility is not realistic if you followed this guide to the letter, since your precious Bitcoin funds now live safely on a new Electrum wallet or any other wallet where you may have chosen to send them. In fact, if you did not delete that wallet file already (it’s in username // app data // roaming // electrum // wallets), at least don’t ever open it again and assume it’s compromised.
You used any other Bitcoin Gold wallet instead of Coinomi
As this is a new coin and one that had a rough (some would say shady) start, many opportunistic developers jumped at the opportunity to create fake / scam / phishing wallets in hopes they would catch somebody with their private keys exposed. Some succeeded too. Right now the recommended wallets to store and operate with Bitcoin Gold are found on the official $BTG website, whereas for importing private keys even some of those have had reports of unreliability. As of now, it’s still safest to go through the trouble of using Coinomi.
Coinomi error: “The address has no funds”
There are two reasons for this error, according to own research and communication from Coinomi:
Your address had no funds at the time of the snapshot of the original Bitcoin blockchain. You may think you did and you may have had some, but from our own tests, if one of your addresses on Electrum had Bitcoin pre-fork and then some more Bitcoin was deposited on top of it post-fork, then it will be like you did not have funds. It’s quite unfair and it will annoy many, but so far, until further notice this seems to be the situation.
Your address starts with a “3”, which means it’s a segwit address. At this time, there is no solution to that and all you can do is be patient and allow the Bitcoin Gold development team to find a workaround. Don’t use any web wallets which promise they have worked this out. The announcement of the fix / patch / workaround will come solely from the BTG team.
Coinomi error: “”The private key type does not match the destination type”
Please refer to this help desk solution by Coinomi themselves. However, exposing the keys to bitaddress can be a security breach. On the other hand, since you don’t have any Bitcoin under them, you have nothing to lose.
Guide to claim Bitcoin Gold from Electrum, step 7 (optional): closing
Thank you for reading this far and hopefully by now you are the proud owner of as many $BTG as you are entitled to.
In creating this guide, we used personal experiments, resources from Bitcointalk, Coinomi help desk, Coinomi on Medium, and the official Bitcoin Gold website.
The comment section is open and we at Cryptoren are more than happy to try to help with particular issues.
