Trying Out Golos, the Russian Only Alternative of Steemit

Golos is the name of the first official Steemit fork, licensed from Steemit. The Golos project is targeted at Russian speaking users and the website is only in Russian as one might expect, though it is pretty much the same as Steemit in terms of functionality. The Golos Blockchain was officially launched yesterday, though it seems that the website (frontend of the project) still needs some things to be fixed and is not operating properly from time to time and not everything is fully functional.

If you have been a Steemit member for a longer period of time the chances that you are able to use the Golos website with your Steemit private keys are very high as they have taken a snapshot of the active users on Steemit a few weeks ago and have imported it on Golos. The users of Steemit should also get some extra Golos tokens in their accounts depending on the amount of Steem tokens they had at the time the snapshot was taken (about 9000 users if I remember correctly). Though my account @cryptos is already present and working on Golos - https://golos.io/@cryptos, I don't see any extra coins other than the 5 Golos coins that new accounts get.

One thing you probably would want to do however if using both Steemit and Golos is to change your private keys and not use the same keys on both sites (if your account has already been created for you). I've tested the built-in functionality for changing the private keys from the Golos website, but unfortunately it does not seem to be working at this point. You should be able to use the CLI_Wallet, however that would require you to compile it yourself first from source and there are apparently no official binaries available yet - https://github.com/GolosChain/golos

I have made a quick post on Golos just to try it out, again the interface is very similar to that of Steemit, though it is in Russian language and not English. I do understand Russian pretty well actually, however I'm not very good at speaking it or writing, so I will probably not be posting much on Golos. What I might do however is try to help curating and maybe even port the @robotev bot to work on Golos, though that will require finding some new curators on the platform to help.

I've already seens that some other non-Russian speaking users have posted some things on Golos, including making available some useful tools for the community to use on Golos as well. @jesta has apparently ported and posted some of his tools that work on the Golos blockchain such as:

• Golos Block Explorer - http://golos.steemdb.com/ (based on SteemDB)
• Golos Live Account Monitoring - http://golos.steemstats.com/ (based on SteemStats)
• Golos public RPC node - golos.steem.ws (can use it for bots for example)
• Golos piblis seed node - golos.steem.ws:4243 (to help you get in sync with local node)

What I'm seeing and not liking very much is that the miner-witness queue on Golos is already being dominated by the same users that have taken over the Steemit miner-witnesss queue (penguin is probably rabbit in disguise). The team behind Golos has promised that if this happens they will work on making available a GPU miner to make things more even and hopefully they will do as a GPU miner will most likely also incentivize miners to mine Steem again as well. So let us see how this goes…

If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

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