This is an Op-ed article written by Arseny Reutov. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this post.
In late October, Bitcoin Gold forked from Bitcoin as a new cryptocurrency, and immediately became the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that knocked it offline at a critical moment. In the months following, Bitcoin Gold has been plagued by a series of attacks across multiple vectors that have impacted on its value and – most importantly – lost innocent users millions of dollars.
Also Read: Three Times as Much Bitcoin Cash Has Been Claimed as Bitcoin Gold
Some people have attributed the attacks on the Bitcoin Gold network to opponents who believe that the fork undermines the cryptocurrency community. Whether this is the case or not, what is clear is that there is a cybersecurity issue within the cryptocurrency community, with Bitcoin Gold just being one of a number of currencies effected. It is imperative now to focus on ways in which attacks on these scale can be prevented from becoming a regular occurrence.
What is Bitcoin Gold?
Bitcoin Gold is one of the latest cryptocurrencies created through the increasingly-common practice of a hard fork. Like Bitcoin Cash before it, Bitcoin Gold branded itself as a new version of Bitcoin, rather than a competing platform like Ethereum, and opted to maintain Bitcoin’s transaction history – which means that those who owned Bitcoin before the fork now own the equivalent of Bitcoin Gold.
The distinction between Bitcoin Gold and its sister currencies largely lies in how it allows coins to be mined. Where traditional Bitcoin mining has arguably become monopolized by companies using custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), Bitcoin Gold aims to decentralize the mining industry with an alternative mining algorithm that’s not susceptible to ASICs. It’s claimed that this will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash through mining, as was the case in the early days of Bitcoin.
However, Bitcoin Gold quickly came under scrutiny from the wider cryptocurrency community. This criticism has typically revolved around the fact that the developers of Bitcoin Gold were given a window of time to privately mine the new network, reducing the number of coins available. Furthermore, there are many in the Bitcoin community who are already strongly opposed to forks or anything that looks to split the user base, now commonly known as Bitcoin maximalists. It has been speculated that the large opposition to Bitcoin Gold may explain why it has come under such determined cyber attack.