Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork Coming in 2 Days – Everything You Should Know about It
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Also known as BGold and BTG, Bitcoin Gold is an upcoming Bitcoin fork that is scheduled for October 25 of this year. There are three days left until Bitcoin Gold sees the light of day. What do we know so far about it?
In this article, I will detail what makes Bitcoin Gold unique, what are the differences with the classic Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, as well as how can we potentially profit from it. But before I delve into that, let’s quickly review what Bitcoin Gold is NOT to avoid any confusions.
Do not to be confused with:
- Bitcoin Cash, which is a fork that happened on August 1st and it has nothing to do with the upcoming Bitcoin Gold.
- BitGold, which is a Canadian company that offers international savings and payments services which allow people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold.
- Bizcoin/S2X SegWit hard fork, which is scheduled for mid-November of the same year.
- Gold – Bitcoin Gold is not related to the real world precious metal in any way.
Bitcoin Gold – from SHA-256 to Equihash
Jack Liao, the CEO of LightningASIC is the man behind BGold. He believes that Bitcoin, as it is today, is suffering from mining centralization. Bitcoin can only be mined by ASICS and only few people have access to those. Furthermore, a handful of big Chinese companies took over most of the mining hashrate, which goes against the idea of a fully decentralized cryptocurrency.
Therefore, Jack and his team planned the fork to “bring Bitcoin mining back to the user“. This way, anyone with a GPU at home can mine their share of coins without the need to invest a penny in an ASIC.
If you are somehow acquainted with mining, you are familiar with the term Equihash. Equihash is an algorithm that stands behind the ZCash, Zencash, Hush and zCash Classic cryptocurrencies. Eventually, the Equihash family of ASIC-resistant coins will soon welcome its newest member – Bitcoin Gold.
Will Bitcoin Gold follow Bitcoin Cash Footsteps?
In other words, what can we expect from Bitcoin Gold in the near future?
Many experts compare BGold with Bitcoin Cash due their similarities in release date, (lack of) community support and the overall direction they took.
This last similarity is actually quite spot-on, since neither fork is addressing an important issue on a revolutionary way. Bitcoin Cash kicked the can down the road when Bitcoin faced scalability issues. There was no mind-blowing innovation in that; hence the solution they’ve provided is temporary.
The changes Bitcoin Gold is about to implement aren’t otherworldly either. The idea of switching from SHA-256 to Equihash was considered before and many experts speculate that it won’t produce any major improvements or even changes in the world of crypto. That being said, time will show.
What Are the Differences Between Bitcoin Gold and Its Kin?
- As we already know, the main selling point is that BGold can be mined with GPUs only. In theory, this should help to overcome mining centralization. In reality though, we often see that big companies manage to buy most GPUs and create centralized GPU mining farms. LightningASIC is one of those companies.
- Money supply and block time is the same for Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin and B2X, being 21 million and 10 minutes, respectively.
- We can see another difference in difficulty adjustment. This parameter is two weeks for Bitcoin and B2X, and 2 weeks + EDA for Bitcoin Cash. In the case of BGold, it adjusts with every block.
- Both Bitcoin Cash and BGold offer replay protection. B2X does not.
- Bitcoin Gold is also the only one of its kin that promises to offer unique address format in the near future. This will hopefully help people to avoid accidentally sending their funds to fork addresses.
If we compare Bitcoin Gold with Bitcoin Cash alone, we can see that BGold is technically more advanced, since technology-wise it follows Bitcoin’s footsteps. For instance, it has adopted SegWit technology. In the future, it might also adopt other Bitcoin’s advancements, such as Lightning Network.
Investment Strategy
There are many opinions on whether it is worth it to keep your BGold or sell it as soon as the fork happens. Some crypto experts are rather pessimistic about the coin. Others are not. As it usually happens, no one knows what strategy is the best.
Personally, I do agree that safety should be the priority here. With the release of BGold all of us will get some tokens for free. In theory, we can simply sell those and get some extra satoshis.
Now, from what I’ve read, I suspect that most people will dump their BGold tokens as soon as the exchangers are ready. This means that the already cheap BTG will fall down to the ground in a matter of minutes.
People will try to profit from the coins they’ve got for free – at least the same happened with Bitcoin Cash. Should you do the same and sell your BTG as soon as you can?
The answer is up to you. Some experts recommend a balanced approach where they sell about 75% of their tokens and keep the rest as a long-term investment in case BGold price rises in the future.
No matter whatever strategy you decide to follow:
- Do remember to avoid any transactions during the fork.
- Make sure your keys are safe. Back them up, if needed.
- Take all your money from exchangers some hours before the fork happens.
No matter whether BGold will bring positive changes or not, do make sure that it won’t bring any negative changes to your wallet.
Bitcoin Gold Controversies
The announcement of BGold wasn’t perfectly well received. One of the reasons is the natural resistance to change. That being said, there are some facts that make it hard for us to figure out whether it is worth our time and money.
The creator of BGold, Jack Liao, is the CEO of LightningASIC. Based in Hong-Kong, the company manufactures cryptocurrency hardware and uses part of it to mine Litecoin.
Like by coincidence, the company got 913 multi-GPU rigs on stock. This could give us an idea about why LightningASIC’s CEO has conceived Bitcoin Gold. If Bitcoin Gold becomes popular, the demand on GPU mining rigs will rise, potentially resulting in more profit for the company.
This is not new for Bitcoin forks, though. People behind both SegWit and Bitcoin Cash made money from their projects. Innovation is good, but developers don’t mind getting some immediate financial reward for their results either.
Some users focus on that fact alone; they despise BGold merely because its creators will profit from the fork. However, personally I don’t see that as a problem as long as the new coin helps the community. But will it help? Or will it disrupt the crypto economy and make it worse?
Bitcoin Gold Distribution
No matter whether you like it or not, once the fork happens, everyone will get their share of Bitcoin Gold according to the amount of Bitcoin they have in their wallet.
Just as it happened when Bitcoin Cash was released, you will get your share of coins in your wallet automatically, but only if you are the one who holds the keys. This means that funds kept in exchanger wallets do not qualify for Bitcoin Gold.
The fork will happen in three days, October the 25th. After that, it will take a week for it to appear on exchangers. November 1st is the official date when BTG will become available for trading. During that week, the devs will work on polishing the coin and solving any emerging technical difficulties.
As for today, there are several scammy sites that will attempt to steal your keys. DO NOT share your private keys with anyone. There is already at least one scammy site that pretends to be backed up by the BGold team. It is not.
The fork is done automatically and you will not have to introduce your personal keys to a third-party website in order to get your BTG tokens.
In Conclusion
You can say that BGold is ahead of Bitcoin Cash and that it might be even considered slightly better than Bitcoin in some aspects. However, will that be enough to make BGold the new mainstream cryoptocurrency? Or will it become some sort of small-scale altcoin meant for miners only?
As I’ve already mentioned, I am still uncertain whether BGold will solve or even address the issue of mining monopolization. In order to survive, it got to offer something to the community. While most experts agree that BGold has way more chances to survive than Bitcoin Cash, it is still uncertain whether it will make it to the list of popular cryptocurrencies upon its release.
If you are concerned about the pre-mine , please be sure to read page 9 of the roadmap. It lays out the road ahead and describes what the premine will be used for over the next three years. https://btcgpu.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/BitcoinGold-Roadmap.pdf
Ethash is the algorithm for Ethereum not Equihash.
oops.. not sure how that ended there haha.. tnx!
Trezor states that Bitcoin Gold lacks replay protection:
https://blog.trezor.io/trezor-statement-on-bitcoin-gold-fork-78cebc0532c7
Some inaccuracies in the article. You don’t automatically get Bitcoin Gold in your wallet. The wallet has to specifically support it or you will have to import your Bitcoin private key to another wallet that does. And exchanges that do support Bitcoin Gold will automatically credit you with it.