All you need to Know about Bitcoin Gold

Bitcoin has proved its mettle in the world of blockchain based cryptocurrencies in the past 5-6 years. Its humongous market value as an asset has made it one of the most desired cryptocurrencies across the globe. With the precedence of time, Bitcoin gradually produced its hard fork named Bitcoin Gold.

Introduction

Before diving any further into Bitcoin Gold, the concept of hard fork must be known. Hard Fork is nothing but a creation of another ‘parallel universe’ in which the currency is based on different protocols. A hard forked currency such as Bitcoin Gold has its own protocols such that there is no backward compatibility.

BTG was founded by the CEO of Lightning ASIC – Jack Liao and it was forked on October 24, 2017. At that instant, it had an amazing block height of 491,407. Furthermore, the initial value of BTG at the time of its launch was 479.82 US Dollars. Despite the value fall, the positive sign is a constant stability of BTG. Even though Bitcoin Gold is somewhat similar to that of Bitcoin, it also has significant differences. In addition to this, after the occurrence of the fork, 8000 blocks were mined at the rate of 12.5 BTGs corresponding to each one.

History of BTG

Bitcoin Gold had an initial value of around 480 US Dollars. Unfortunately, the currency faced a sudden drop and gradually the value declined over the precedence of time. Crypto gurus claim that this happened because of the DDOS attack on its website soon after its launch. Furthermore, the substantial drop of BTG is also because of its relatively new community and unexpectedly lesser support from the existing community of BTC.

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The attack on Bitcoin Gold

Unfortunately, in May 2018 BTG along with two cryptocurrencies were attacked by an anonymous hacker. The 51% hashing attack was successful due to which, BTG worth 18.6 Million US Dollars was moved in a cryptocurrency exchange. After this, it was returned back to the ledger governed by PoW with mining power of  >51%.

Also Read: The Complete Beginners Guide to understanding Stablecoins

Distinguishing features of Bitcoin Gold

Apart from block height, the main features of BTG are given below:

• BTG ecosystem is tradeable on more than 18 wallets, 75 exchanges, and a dozen pools such as coinblockers, minergate, pool.gold, BTGPool P, ZHash etc.
• In addition to this, BTG has been transacted to a value of more than $36.7 bb.
• In order to make it secure, the BTG utilizes the ironclad measures such as replay protection system and unique cryptocurrency wallet addresses.
• BTG is more decentralized as compared to its other counterparts. This provides more mining flexibility amongst the mass audience.

Also read: If Bitcoin crashes, the party stops?

What separates Bitcoin Gold from the Bitcoin?

BTG has significant differences from Bitcoin which are mentioned below:

• Firstly, BTG uses a PoW algorithm called Equihash which is faster and has a vast memory than the conventional Secure Hash Algorithm used by Bitcoin.
• Moreover, one of the best thing about this hard forked currency is that it can be mined on ubiquitous GPUs which was not feasible with Bitcoin.
• Apart from these, BTG has a relatively small user base as compared to its parent currency.