What is Bitcoin Gold? An Another Bitcoin Hard Fork

Bitcoin endured a hard fork this August when Bitcoin Cash spun out from the current Bitcoin system. Yet, it seems another fork lies on the road ahead as Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is on its way and could be here as early as 25 October, in a month from now.

Benefits of Bitcoin Gold

The idea behind Bitcoin Gold seems to be the release of an improved protocol, allowing users to mine currency with graphic processing units (GPUs) due to a change in Bitcoin’s algorithm. Bitcoin Gold is also rumored to use the Equihash algorithm instead of Bitcoin’s original SHA256.

Started by Hong Kong mining firm LightningASIC’s CEO Jack Liao, Bitcoin Gold is scheduled to launch October 25, with exchanges starting November 1. At this point, there are many in the industry who are still dubious about the truth of the news, believing the upcoming fork to be another distraction in the already fractured community. Yet, there are also many who are excited about the upcoming fork, and the goal it strives to achieve – the decentralization of Bitcoin.

The replacement of SHA256 with Equihash will open up mining to more users, making big mining companies irrelevant. If successful, Bitcoin Gold will remedy the problem of mining monopolies – big mining companies who currently exert a lot of influence over network. Still, this is something far into the future even if successful; especially as GPU markets are controlled by Nvidia and AMD, making decentralization hard.

Price and Dates

According to project website archive, Bitcoin Gold plans to launch an initial coin offering (ICO) to “help BTG chain the longest Bitcoin blockchain” and “all raised BTC will used to hire developers, advertisement, etc.” which is planned to be sold at an exchange rate of 10 Bitcoin Gold = 1 Bitcoin, although specific ICO dates and token amounts have not been fixed. The only confirmation received so far is that every Bitcoin user at the time will have an equal amount of Bitcoin Gold associated with their private key.

The pseudonymous lead developer for the Bitcoin Gold project “h4x” said, “Organisms derive benefits from creating offspring. With Bitcoin Gold we are conducting an experiment to see if that principle holds true in the world of blockchains”