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.
In short, bitcoin gold aims to achieve two goals:
Instead of scaling bitcoin to support more users, bitcoin gold tweaks bitcoin in an effort to "make bitcoin decentralized again." This, proponents argue, will make the network, designed to offer an egalitarian way to send payments digitally around the globe, more accessible to users.And while created via the same mechanism, bitcoin gold differs from bitcoin cash in a few ways, most notably in its distribution.Differences include:
Of course, while it aims to become the de-facto version of bitcoin, others might consider bitcoin gold an "altcoin" – the term has long been used to denote any cryptocurrency launched using bitcoin’s existing code, but that has an alternative market or use case.
On 25th October, Bitcoin is going to see another hard fork implemented that will result in a new cryptocurrency named Bitcoin Gold (BTG). As we saw with Bitcoin Cash in the summer, existing private keys holding Bitcoin balances will receive the same amount in Bitcoin Gold on 1st November, though as things stand, it may be a number of weeks before Bitcoin Gold will be tradable.Developers, miners and a number of key contributors including Jack Liao, the CEO of Hong Kong mining manufacturer LightningAsic, are behind Bitcoin Gold, with other parties involved including Chinese mining tycoon and owner of Bitcoin news portal Jinse.com and the project’s anonymous lead developer H4x3.For now, Bitcoin Gold has been characterized as a friendly fork by the development team as Bitcoin Gold considered to be complementary to Bitcoin. The key consideration is to block anticipated upgrades of Bitcoin through hard forks.H4x3 describes Bitcoin gold as a real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades. Ultimately, the purpose of Bitcoin Gold is to compete with Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and GPU coins, by bringing down the current Bitcoin miningmonopolies and increasing centralization in order to serve and protect the Bitcoin world.Supporters of Bitcoin Gold hold the view that the best crypto engineers are working on Core and for this reason, Bitcoin Gold will try to follow Core as much as possible.The biggest change to the code in Bitcoin Gold is that it uses a different mining algorithm, resistant to ASIC chips, called Equihash. Similar to Ethereum, the use of GPUs will be needed to mine Bitcoin Gold in place of Bitcoin’s current Asics mining machines, which have been blamed for the centralization of Bitcoin.With Ethereum’s planned switch from Proof of Work mining to Proof of Stake next year, Bitcoin Gold developers’ decision to move away from Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm to the Equihash algorithm is a timely one.Other anticipated changes from Bitcoin include an alteration to the adjustment time. Bitcoin has the level of difficulty to solve a block adjusted every 2-weeks and, with unstable hashpower experienced since the Bitcoin Cash fork, Bitcoin Gold will have the level of difficulty adjusted to every block found.While miners are yet able to test-mine Bitcoin Gold, plans are in place to enable miners to test on a testnet within the next couple of weeks, though there has yet to be the replay protection coding that will protect Bitcoin Gold users from accidentally spending real Bitcoin or Bitcoin Gold, also referred to as a replay attack.Get Into Bitcoin Trading Today.It all certainly sounds friendly enough, if you’re not one of the mining cartels that control much of the Bitcoin hashpower, though there has been some dissatisfaction over news that developers will be the only miners for a period of time after the hard fork.The Bitcoin Gold fork is another battle in the war between the mining cartel and Bitcoin’s core developers. The mining cartel in search of even more hashpower and centralization, while Bitcoin’s core developers look to reverse the centralization that has been seen in recent years.
Bitcoin gold price is holding the $260 support against the US Dollar. BTG/USD may soon gain traction and move above $300-310 in the near term.
The team behind the hard fork appears to be a relatively small group.Hong Kong-based LightningAsic CEO Jack Liao, who's an outspoken critic of the state of bitcoin mining, first broached the idea of bitcoin gold back in July.His company LightningAsic sells mining equipment, including GPUs, the type of computing hardware bitcoin gold is supposed to rely on.Since first introduced earlier this summer, the team has expanded to include pseudonymous lead developer h4x3rotab, as well as a team of five other volunteers who are now working on developing and promoting the cryptocurrency in their spare time.The project can be tracked on Github and on the community Slack group.
