Marc Serafino
Like having two Bitcoins is not enough — the “regular” Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — a group of enthusiasts plans to do it again. On October 25, they plan to fork the Bitcoin blockchain and create another cryptocurrency – the Bitcoin Gold (BTG).
No one expects this new cryptocurrency to replace the “standard” Bitcoin, but it will surely have some fans since all Bitcoin users will get it free of charge… and who doesn’t like free money?
Before we delve into details, make sure to read our article about cryptocurrency forks. Also, you may have heard that people refer to Bitcoin as digital gold — this upcoming fork has little to do with that. If you want to learn more about Bitcoin being a digital gold, check out this article.
That being said, let’s take a look at what this fork is all about…
1. Bitcoin Gold aims to return power to ordinary users
Today, you can’t mine bitcoin; that space is occupied by a few giant firms that have farms of servers dedicated to completing/closing blocks in the blockchain (and get rewarded for their effort). Unsurprisingly, this same group holds all (or most of) the cards within Bitcoin, both as a voting demographic and as manipulators of things like price and fees.
Bitcoin Gold aims to change the situation and bring back mining to the regular folk. The fork changes the network’s proof of work algorithm to Equihash, which is designed to discourage the use of dedicated machines called ASICs for mining. In turn, it makes it possible to mine for Bitcoin Gold with graphic cards found in many home computers.
2. Lack of community support
The problem with Bitcoin Gold is that it may not have enough community support, and could thus be avoided by major cryptocurrency exchanges. So far, only two exchanges have committed to list BTG in November: Hong Kong’s Bitexchange, and a new CFD exchange – Bitstar.
Perhaps free money — provided with the new currency to the existing Bitcoin owners — may push many users to switch boats, perhaps not.
Also, the lack of technical information, mining software and block explorer for the new fork doesn’t help either. For one reason or another, proponents of Bitcoin Gold haven’t compiled (enough) documentation about the changes they want to introduce, leaving many to wonder whether this fork will actually take place or not.
3. The main guy behind Bitcoin Gold makes ASIC machines
The driving force behind Bitcoin Gold is a team of developers, miners, and other contributors led by Jack Liao, the CEO of Hong Kong mining manufacturer LightningAsic. For the endeavor, Liao has teamed-up with Wubi, a Chinese mining tycoon and owner of Chinese Bitcoin news portal Jinse.com. Also, there’s the (anonymous) lead developer who goes by the name of H4x3rotab, as well as several other contributors who can be found inside the project’s GitHub project and Slack channel.
4. Bitcoin Gold will follow Bitcoin Core
According to Liao, Bitcoin Gold may use a different hashing algorithm, but other than that – it will try to follow Bitcoin Core as much as possible.
“We will use Segwit and try to follow Core as closely as possible,” he told BraveNewCoin. “Because unlike Bcash [Bitcoin Cash], we know that the best engineers in the industry are working on Core, so that is obviously the best technical roadmap to take Bgold safely into the future.”
Bitcoin lead developer H4x3rotab added that Bitcoin Gold is a “real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades.”
5. Another fork is coming in November
And that one will be broadly accepted as it has been in development for quite some time. This upgrade will see the introduction of the SegWit2x scaling solution that should make transactions faster to complete, thus increasing the overall capacity of the network.
Our advice to readers who own Bitcoins is to follow the news and if this fork does happen — they’ll get some free money to “play with.” We know we’ll be doing the same, and get back to you as soon as we have something additional to report about Bitcoin Gold. Stay tuned.
