BTG
21,000,000
16,777,511
2017
Jack Liao, the owner of Lightning ASIC
anonymous person nicknamed H4x3rotab
1MB (2 - 4 MB)
163 GB (2017)
10 minutes per block
equihash
special hardware, cloud mining pool s
The main goal of Bitcoin Gold is to enable the ordinary users to mine the currency as we saw in the early stages of the history of bitcoin. In the olden days, you could mine bitcoin literally at home. The key claim of this crypto is “Let’s make bitcoin decentralised again”. For mining Bitcoin Gold uses the traditional GPU - graphics card (like the one you have on your PC) to live up to the bitcoin founder’s idea of keeping this crypto decentralised and fully in the hands of its users.
The key person behind this crypto is Jack Liao, the founder of Hong Kong based mining company - Lightning ASIC network. In various discussions you can see loads of posts criticising Jack for building his business mostly on expensive ASIC’s chips, which contradicts the goal of the BTG launched in collaboration with an anonymous developer to return power to the investor by making mining the Bitcoin Gold possible via a cheap GPU chip. On the other hand, you can hear voices claiming that this is just a smart business move and that Liao’s plan is to get this type of cryptocurrency business under control.
Another person, playing a key role in Bitcoin Gold, is a chief developer nicknamed h4x3rotab. Other members on the team are: Robert Kuhne (strategy), Alejandro Regojo (organisation), Martin Kuvandzhiev (consulting/development), Franco Niebles (UX).
A man who participated in the funding of this altcoin is known as Wubi, the owner of China’s crypto portal Jinse.com.
Bitcoin Gold is supported by GPU chips using equihash as an algorithm. BTG’s aim is to further decentralise the business, because with the current bitcoin blockchain the mining is driven by large pools, all having to use ASICs to survive in the harsh competitive environment.
Bitcoin Gold declares that if the mining with equihash becomes more and more centralised (e.g. after developing some machine that is able to speed up the mining process with this algorithm to bring it to a more centralised option) then they would not hesitate to modify the algorithm again.
The hard fork of the main blockchain took place on 24 October 2017 at 6:00 UTC.
Most of the criticism was over mining coins in the aftermath of the crypto launch, approved by the key developers. There is no hard data available about this transaction, but estimates say that it was at least 1 % of the total.
You can download the roadmap (regarded as the currency’s whitepaper) here:
Right now, Bitcoin Gold enjoys minimal support in terms of real usage or payments. Although the hard fork took place on 25 October 2017, the new blockchain was officially launched as late as 12 November 2017 and surrounded by many...
On 12 November 2017, BTG closed the day at 470 USD. However, soon after the blockchain’s introduction, it continued to fall until 20 November 2017 to reaching its low at 120 USD. In the recent 10 days the trend line has been showing a moderate decline oscillating around 300 USD per BTG. Yet, the overall market capitalisation of the crypto has declined, the same as the exchange rate. The current market capitalisation stands at around 5 billion USD.
Complicated by technical errors, the introduction of the new blockchain aroused a lot of criticism among the users. On the very first day, the mining didn’t work. People could use 100 000 pre-mined coins. New miners of the Supernova pool complained on Twitter about the small reward they received for a block, given that the coin was a new kid on the block. Others, from pool.gold warned that either a Trojan horse or a giant player with a capacity far exceeding the rest might be in the network. This would suggest that the decentralisation may not be as realistic as proclaimed or indicate some other problems.
The technical problems impacted the end users and investors as well. Especially those downloading the Bitcoin Gold wallet installer from the official GitHub, from 21st to 26th November 2017. It’s published in the official statement that at the time of downloading the installer the system was malware-infected: https://bitcoingold.org/critical-warning-nov-26/
According to Forbes, the Bitcoin Gold fork left the investors disillusioned and it lead to minimal demand for investments in the wake of its launch. The above problems accompanying the cryptocurrencies since the early stages, culminated in an unconvincing launch of the blockchain and some later attacks against the miners, end users and wallet holders.
The primary mission of bitcoin gold is to decentralise the entire bitcoin blockchain to restore trust in bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin gold aspires to become a dignified modification of bitcoin, ready for future development and network scalability.
Yet, still the question remains over whether the flaws and warning signals surrounding the project, since the very beginning, are not a big exclamation mark for those who consider investing in this altcoin.
The main official document showing the essential thesis regarding the currency can be found at the below address:
