DDoS Attack Pulls Down Bitcoin Gold Website

| Updated
by Bhushan Akolkar · 3 min read
DDoS Attack Pulls Down Bitcoin Gold Website
Photo: Florian Rothlehner / Flickr

Ever since the initiation of the hard-fork resulting into a new cryptocurrency – Bitcoin Gold (BTG) – from the bitcoin blockchain, the BTG website has been constantly under DDoS attacks and has not resumed operations ever since.

Update on October 25, 2017: The Bitcoin Gold’s official website (www.btcgpu.org) works fine now. The development team released the official roadmap on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, a new hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain network gave rise to a new cryptocurrency Bitcoin Gold (BTG) and ever since then the official website has been constantly under DDoS attacks.

This new hard-fork which resulted into a derivative cryptocurrency of the popular Bitcoin, has been aimed for establishing a fair platform different from the Bitcoin network which is alleged to have been dominated by large companies. The existing bitcoin mining process requires high-end powerful computing hardware which is quite a lot expensive and certainly not affordable to ordinary miners. As a result the mining process is said to have got centralised into the hands of large companies.

With Bitcoin Gold, the miners aim to democratise the mining process by bringing Bitcoin’s inherent value proposition of having a decentralised mode of operation. The first step of the Bitcoin Gold initiation was to take a “snapshot” of the bitcoin blockchain while creating a replica with new set of rules. Moreover, the BTG technical team has decided to release the cryptocurrency absolutely free for all those who are holding bitcoins at the time of fork.

Soon after the process was initiated the BTG developer team had started reporting issues pertaining to DDoS attacks on the website.

And even hours after the initiation process the attacks seem to have stopped nowhere denying enthusiasts to keep any track of the newly generated BTG cryptocurrency. Adding to the woes, the additional fact is that the new blockchain hasn’t turned public yet and the explorer and tracking tools have not been released yet.

Owing to the controversial and divisive nature of cryptocurrency projects such as the Bitcoin Gold, the denial-of-service attacks have been a common phenomenon in occurrence. Jack Liao, LightningAsic CEO, who is said to be the brain behind the BTG’s creation has been quite vocal and critical about the existing mining process of Bitcoins targeting several companies which are profiting from the mining process. His open criticism could possibly be a reason for such attacks.

However, in addition to this, there are other reasons attributed to the cause of criticism for Bitcoin Gold. Few developer channels are quite skeptical about BTG using a process in which the BTG will be privately created before being publicly available as an open-source project.

Another cause of concern with the Bitcoin Gold is that it has not solved the risk of a “replay attack” which could possibly increase transaction complications when two completely incompatible version of the bitcoin blockchain will be unable to distinguish from each other.

At the press time Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is trading at $262, according to the CoinMarketCap Index. The price of Bitcoin (BTC) took a slight hit after the hard fork, losing more than $300 of its all-time max value of  $6,000 per-coin.

The Bitcoin Gold is still in the development process and we have yet to hear any official from its developer technical team regarding the future plans and its modus operandi.

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