Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork is Coming: What People Need to Know

Rage Review : After Bitcoin Cash appeared in August, Bitcoin is about to have another fork - Bitcoin Gold (BGold or BTG). Its founder is the CEO of LightningASIC, a mining hardware manufacturer. Since the company will make a profit from this fork, many people despise it. In general, it has received less community support, similar to the situation of Bitcoin Cash. In any case, this fork is about to appear, and as for its future development, it depends on whether it can truly solve the problem of mining centralization for the community as it claims.

Translation: Ina

Bitcoin Gold (BGold or BTG) is the Bitcoin fork that is expected to appear on October 25th. That moment is coming soon. So what do we know about it so far?

This article details what makes BGold special, how it differs from Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, and how we can profit from it. First, let’s take a look at the differences between BGold and the following concepts to avoid confusion.

Bitcoin Cash: This is a fork that occurred on August 1 this year and has nothing to do with the upcoming BGold.

BitGold: This is a Canadian company that provides cross-border deposit and payment services, allowing individuals and businesses to transfer and deposit physical gold.

Bizcoin/S2X: The SegWit hard fork is expected to occur in mid-November this year.

Gold : BGold has no relation to real world gold.

BGold - From SHA-256 to EQUIHASH

The man behind BGold is Liao Xiang, CEO of LightningASIC. He believes that Bitcoin today is plagued by mining centralization. Bitcoin can only be mined by ASICS, but only a few people have access. In addition, some large Chinese companies occupy most of the mining hash rate, which violates the concept of a fully decentralized crypto token.

Therefore, Liao Xiang and his team plan to carry out this fork to "enable users to truly mine Bitcoin." In this way, anyone with a GPU can mine coins by themselves without investing in ASICs.

Liao Xiang said: "BGold will change the proof-of-work algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash. This new algorithm has the characteristics of ASIC stability and is suitable for GPU mining."

If you know about mining, then you must be familiar with the term Equihash. Equihash is the algorithm used by Ethereum, Zencash, Hush, and zCash Classic cryptocurrencies. The Equihash token family will soon welcome the newest member, BGold.

Will BGold be the same as Bitcoin Cash?

In other words, what can we expect from BGold’s performance?

Many experts compare BGold to Bitcoin Cash due to their similarities in release date, (less) community support, and overall direction.

The similarities in direction are especially clear, as neither fork solves an important problem in a revolutionary way. Bitcoin Cash is a stopgap measure for Bitcoin’s scalability problems, and there is nothing very innovative about it, so the solutions they offer are only temporary.

The changes that BGold is about to bring are not particularly special. The idea of ​​switching from SHA-256 to Equihash has been considered before, and many experts speculate that it will not bring any major improvements or changes to the cryptocurrency world. That being said, time will tell.

How is BGold different from other Bitcoins?

As mentioned before, the main selling point of BGold is that it can be mined using only GPUs. In theory, this should help solve the problem of mining centralization. In practice, we often see a few large companies trying to buy up most of the GPUs and create centralized GPU mining farms. LightningASIC is one such company.

Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin, and B2X all have the same money supply and block time of 21 million and 10 minutes.

They differ in the difficulty adjustment. Bitcoin and B2X have this parameter of two weeks, Bitcoin Cash has it more than two weeks. BGold adjusts it every block.

Both Bitcoin Cash and BGold offer replay attack protection, but B2X does not.

BGold is also the only one of these coins that promises to provide a unique address format in the near future. This may help people avoid accidentally sending funds to a forked address.

If we only compare BGold to Bitcoin Cash, then we can see that BGold is more technologically advanced because it follows in the footsteps of Bitcoin in terms of technology. For example, it uses SegWit technology. In the future, it may also adopt other developments of Bitcoin, such as the Lightning Network.

Investment Strategy

There are many opinions on whether to keep BGold or sell it when the fork occurs. Some cryptocurrency experts are quite pessimistic about the currency, but others are supportive. As usual, no one knows what strategy is the best.

Personally, I agree that security should be the primary concern here. With the release of BGold, we will all get some tokens for free. In theory, we can sell them and get some extra satoshis.

Now, from what I have observed, I suspect that most people will sell their BGold tokens as soon as the exchange is ready. This means that the already cheap BTG will drop to rock bottom in price within minutes.

People will try to profit from the tokens they get for free, at least that was the case when Bitcoin Cash came out. So should people also do the same and sell their BTG right away?

The answer to this question depends on the user. Some experts recommend a balanced approach, which is to sell about 75% of the tokens and keep the rest as a long-term investment in case the price of BGold increases in the future.

Whatever strategy you decide to follow:

1. Remember to avoid any transactions during a fork.

2. Make sure your key is safe. Back it up if necessary.

3. Withdraw all funds from exchanges a few hours before the fork occurs.

Regardless of whether BGold will bring positive changes, make sure it does not bring any negative changes to your wallet.

The debate over Bitcoin Gold

The announcement of BGold was not very well received. One of the reasons is that it is inherently resistant to change. There are a few things that really make it difficult for us to decide whether it is worth our time and money.

BGold's founder, Liao Xiang, is the CEO of LightningASIC, a Hong Kong-based company that manufactures cryptocurrency hardware and uses some of it to mine Litecoin.

The company has 913 multi-GPU rigs. In this way, we can understand why the CEO of LightningASIC thought of creating Bitcoin Gold. If Bitcoin Gold becomes popular, the demand for GPU mining rigs will rise, which may bring more profits to the company.

This is nothing new when it comes to Bitcoin forks. The manipulators of SegWit and Bitcoin Cash also made money from their projects. Innovation is good, and developers naturally don’t mind getting some immediate financial rewards for the fruits of their labor.

Some users only focus on this and despise BGold because its creator will profit from this fork. However, as long as this new token can help the community, I personally don’t see anything wrong with its profit-making behavior. But will it help the community? Or will it destroy the crypto economy and make the situation worse?

Bitcoin Gold Allocation

Whether you like it or not, once the fork happens, everyone will get a certain share of Bitcoin Gold based on the amount of Bitcoin in their wallet.

Just like when Bitcoin Cash was issued, the coins will appear automatically in the user’s wallet, but with the user holding the key. This means that funds kept in exchange wallets cannot be turned into Bitcoin Gold.

The fork will occur on October 25, and it will take a week for it to appear on exchanges. The official date when BTG will be available for trading is November 1. During that week, its developers will improve the token and resolve any new technical issues that arise.

Although the fork will be completed within 6 hours, it will take several days for the Bitcoin Gold network to get on track. This means that users will not be able to get BTG on the day of the fork. Obviously, no one knows how long it will take for the BTG network to be launched. Its developers promised on the official Bitcoin Gold website that this work will be completed in "a few days".

But now several scam sites have emerged that try to steal users' keys. Please do not share your private keys with anyone. At least one scam site has appeared that pretends to be backed by the BGold team, but it is not.

The fork will be done automatically, and users will not have to hand over their personal keys to a third-party website to obtain their BTG tokens.

in conclusion

You could say BGold is ahead of Bitcoin Cash, and might even be considered slightly better than Bitcoin in some ways. However, will this be enough to make BGold the new mainstream cryptocurrency? Or will it become a small altcoin that only matters to miners?

As I said before, I am still not sure whether BGold will solve the mining monopoly problem. In order to survive, it must offer something to the community. Although most experts believe that BGold has a better chance of survival than Bitcoin Cash, it is still not certain whether it will become one of the mainstream cryptocurrencies.