What is Bitcoin Gold (BTG)? All You Need to Know About it
Bitcoin gold (BTG) is the result of Hard Fork of the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Bitcoin Gold is the new branch of Bitcoin Blockchain at block 491407.
There is no alteration in the original bitcoin Blockchain and this new
branch split off to become a new cryptocurrency. According to the
founders of Bitcoin Gold, the idea behind this new coin is to change the
aspects of mining on Bitcoin Blockchain.
Generally, most of the bitcoin mining is done by large companies. That
being said, these giant companies are ruling bitcoin mining which has
made bitcoin Blockchain too much centralized. Bitcoin gold is the
attempt to implement changes in order to make mining fairer for all.
With Bitcoin gold, anyone can start mining with basic system hardware
and thus it is an attempt to make the system more decentralized. Not
only larger companies will control the mining, but it is also now a wide
network of miners.
Initial Bitcoin Gold
As we all know Bitcoin Gold is the hard fork of Bitcoin Blockchain, so
founders decided to distribute the initial Bitcoin to everyone who owned
bitcoin before the HardFork. Holders received the same amount of
Bitcoin gold in 1:1 ratio. There is no steps or request required to get
the Bitcoin Gold. After the coin distribution, the only tricky thing is
to claim your coins. I said tricky because this depends on your wallet
set up. You can trade Bitcoin gold in almost all the popular exchanges
like Binance, HitBTC, Okex etc.
Bitcoin gold mining
For the miner, Bitcoin gold mining is good news. The set-up is quite
simple, and you do not need ASICS to mine, just a GPU would be enough.
1. Join a mining pool among the top list.
2. Choose your popular option(pool.gold).
3. Download the mining software as per your pool.
4. Set up your BTG(Bitcoin gold) wallet. You can choose one from BTGwallet.online(https://btgwallet.online/) and Bitcoin Gold core wallet(https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU).
4. Set up your BTG(Bitcoin gold) wallet. You can choose one from BTGwallet.online(https://btgwallet.online/) and Bitcoin Gold core wallet(https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU).
5. There will be separate instructions of mining based on your GPU
After the HardFork, we often assume that the new currency is the
competitor to the base one. However, this is not true in the case of
Bitcoin Gold. The algorithm of BTG is different and no current Bitcoin
miner would want to switch to this anti-ASIC cryptocurrency. Bitcoin
gold competes with other anti-ASIC cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and
there are a lot of challenges too. BTG is having the advantage of its
distribution and popularity due to bitcoin.
Replay protection
Bitcoin gold is an open source community driven project developed by volunteer developers. This project is completely transparent and growing at a very good pace. With everything going well there is a lack as well. When it comes to security Bitcoin Gold is not the choice of investors. BTG is still struggling with its security and protection. Replay protection is very much critical. BTG is the result of HardFork, and the shared wallet address and code makes it prone to replay attack. BTG team is working on a solution which involves SIGHASH_FORK_ID mechanism which limits the transaction to be transferred from BTC to BTG.
Final thoughts
Every new cryptocurrency is struggling to lead industry standards and promote decentralization mechanism. Bitcoin gold has the advantage of being popular and it is designed to promote decentralization in Blockchain network. However, there is nothing more exciting and new in Bitcoin Gold which makes it an individual investment. If you received your free BTG and you have faith in, there is no loss in holding your asset.
Bitcoin is still leading the chart and it is not easy to compete with such a strong history.