Bitcoin Gold Fork Coming: How To Double Your Bitcoins
t has been only 9 weeks since the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, and we are again discussing another Bitcoin hard fork.
For those of you who don’t know about the previous Bitcoin hard forks and its challenges, read my earlier guides here:
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – A New feather in Bitcoin’s fork cap
What is a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)?
Bitcoin Fork Coming: How To Prepare For Replay Attacks (What are replay attacks?)
And for those of you who aren’t aware of the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork, pay attention.
In this article, I intend to cover everything you need to know about the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork and how to prepare and benefit from it by doubling you coin holdings.
Wowowow… double!!
Some of you may think this is a good thing as your value will also double!
Note: Doubling of coins does not mean doubling of value, because after a hard fork, the value of both versions of coins are determined based on user sentiments and demand/supply in the market.
So keeping that point in mind, let’s get started…
New Bitcoin Fork – Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
Bitcoin Gold is a new, would be cryptocurrency denoted, as of now, as BTG or “bgold”. It will be a fork of the original Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto invented in 2008.
The Bitcoin Gold community defines BTG in the following fashion:
Bitcoin Gold is a community-activated hard fork of Bitcoin to make mining decentralized again.
At present, there is very little information available about the technical know-how of this fork because their website is under development.
Who Is Doing This Fork And When Is It Happening?
The Bitcoin Gold project is being driven by some developers, miners, and their head Jack Liao, the CEO of the Hong Kong-based mining equipment manufacturing company, LightningAsic.
Bitcoin Gold’s lead developer is someone anonymous by the name of h4x3rotab and he/she claims that:
Bitcoin Gold is also a real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades.
As per their official website, the exact time is not yet known for this fork.
But the official date for the fork is mentioned as 2017-10-25 (25th October 2017) but better to follow the block height which is block 491407.
Why Is It Happening?
This is a community-driven hard fork without any consensus voting. It is primarily being driven by a few who believe that the original Bitcoin mining system has become centralized and is monopolized by a handful of mining companies.
They believe this because of ASIC miners which provide a very strong entry barrier for an average user or miner like you and me.
And now, these hard fork supporters want to change that and make the process more decentralized.
As per their Twitter:
BitcoinGold
How Do BTG Supporters Want To Change This Centralization Problem?
BTG (i.e. Bitcoin Gold) advocates have decided to solve this problem by forking Bitcoin on 25th October by changing its original protocol.
Specifically, to combat the mining centralization problem, the BTG developers are implementing a different mining algorithm altogether that will be resistant to ASIC chips called Equihash.
This will make ASIC miners irrelevant for mining Bitcoin Gold because, with the implementation of Equihash, Bitcoin Gold will be mineable simply by using cheap GPUs.
Note: Currently, Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 mining algorithm (read about SHA-256).
What’s Their Other Agenda?
Their other agenda is to save Bitcoin in case something happens to it in the future, as they claim will.
Also, I think they want to compete with other GPU minable cryptocurrencies like Zcash, Ethereum, and Monero.
And with Ethereum moving to POS consensus, this is a kind of masterstroke for this Bitcoin-branded coin (BTG) because then those Ethereum mining people will have to switch to either BTG or Zcash or another GPU minable currency in the future.
But they know that they are not competing with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as stated by their lead developer in a conversation with Bitcoin.com.
Features of Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
Bitcoin Gold doesn’t bring many features with it, but…
BTG will be based on Equihash so it will be GPU minable.
BTG will have inbuilt replay protection because it is a direct fork of BTC.
BTG will have a variable difficulty that will change per block. (Good thing for GPU miners.)
And looks like BTG will have a pool of pre-mined coins for 16,000 blocks.
Apart from these, there will be no changes like block size adjustment.
And BTG will be following the suit of the original BTC core developers for the future betterment of their coin because they believe that’s the secure way.
My Opinion
I have mixed feelings toward this because of several reasons…
It’s a good idea to have a GPU-minable algorithm. This will surely prevent centralization and currently, there is no GPU-minable Bitcoin hard fork. So it’s good in that sense.
On the other hand, their development and way forward look depressing. There is literally no information whatsoever on their GitHub or official website. Moreover, on GitHub, none of their developers are publically available.
Also, haywire information sources on the Bitcointalk forum raise massive red flags about their future and their intentions. I was really surprised to learn that they might have an ICO for these pre-mined blocks, but again, there is little clarity about it on their official website.
But… let’s say that around 25th October they have beaten all odds, clarified the much-needed information about their project, and we have a fork… then what to do in that case?
Then the only thing to do is enjoy and claim your free airdropped Bitcoin Gold coins!
Confession: I am going sell some part of BTG immediately (if a fork happens) and will HODL the rest of it.