~ Digital currency
Hard forks are very common in the crypto space and one digital currency that has experienced several forks is Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Gold fork which occurred in 2018 is one of the most controversial forks we’ve seen and the fork took place at block 491407. When the coin was launched, members of the community felt that what inspired the hard fork was greed.
What really led to this accusation was the fact that the developers of BTG carried out a post-mine after the crypto has been launched and ended up mining the first 1000,000 BTG coins retroactively. It was rumoured that the coins were sent directly to the wallet of the founder of Bitcoin Gold, Jack Liao.
However, the funds were actually raised to serve as an endowment to assist in maintaining and growing the network. Another controversy that BTG suffered after its launch has to do with one of its lead developers. He was accused of hiding a 0.5 percent fee in a BTG mining pool but this is also believed to be politically motivated. Since the code was open source, the fee was not hidden and when compared to the typical fees that most mining pools charged (about 1–2 percent), the fee lesser.
So, Why the Hard Fork?
Hard forks happen for several reasons. it could be as a result of differences among developers, an improvement to the code, changing the goals of the blockchain or for scalability issues, especially as the number of users increase. So, what was the reason for Bitcoin Gold fork? The reason put forward was to “make bitcoin decentralized again.”
This reason may sound absurd, especially to the average person who may not be enlightened about the operations of blockchain technology. It’s common to hear people say that Bitcoin is decentralized and they are true to an extent because it has no links to any central bank, government or a particular country. Bitcoin is a global currency and those who control Bitcoin are members of the community.
But that’s not what the developers of Bitcoin gold had in mind when they imply that Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. They weren’t really interested in central issuance of Bitcoin. Their major concern has to do with the Bitcoin mining process as well as the increase in the number of large ASIC mining operations. These miners were beginning to control the hash power of the network significantly.
So, the team of developers behind Bitcoin Gold decided to move to the Equihash consensus algorithm and ensure that Bitcoin Gold is ASIC resistant. This would greatly help to return the mining hash power back to the average user.
The cost of Bitcoin mining and the amount of resources needed to mine the coin has compelled people to combine their resources to create large and “centralized” mining operations. Well, with such large mining operations, solo miners were now compelled construct their super-powerful mining rigs and this involves a lot of money. So, those interested in mining Bitcoin would either choose to join centralized mining pools or spend so much money to acquire a mining rig.
Changing the algorithm of Bitcoin became one of the central goals of Bitcoin Gold. This was to prevent centralized mining pools from using specialized ASIC chips to mine the coin. With the mining algorithm, large mining operations won’t be able to dominate the mining process and solo miners can now rely on their computer’s GPU.
So, Bitcoin Gold is a digital currency that was founded on Bitcoin fundamentals and all that users require to mine the coin is a common GPU and not a special ASIC.
Bitcoin Gold developers were also interested in dealing with other issues they believed Bitcoin faced such as protection, distribution and transparency. One major concern that crypto users have is security because of the threat of hackers who are exploring all the available options to steal people’s funds. This need for security motivated the creators of BTG to add extra security measures to the coin starting from the day of the hard fork.
Part of the measures they put in place was creating unique wallet addresses for the new coin. Also, they created replay protection for Bitcoin Gold to ensure that there wouldn’t be the issue of double spending. The team of developers also added transparency to Bitcoin Gold by making the blockchain open-source software that’s developed by volunteer developers from different locations around the world.
One of the factors that would be appealing to potential investors and users of Bitcoin Gold has to do with the project’s source code which is freely available. When a coin isn’t listed on any of the biggest exchanges, they often fail to attract the interest of investors but Bitcoin Gold never had issues being listed on exchanges.
Some of the exchanges you will find BTG are Bittrex, Binance and Bitfinex. There is so much to learn about the crypto space which keeps growing every day. “The Digital World of Crypto Riches” is a collection of crypto summaries for over a hundred cryptocurrencies. This is an excellent way to discover the amazing achievements of top blockchain projects and the future of this space.
~ The official website of Bitcoin Gold is https://bitcoingold.org/
