Bitcoin Gold, which has gone through a bumpy ride after the second Bitcoin hard fork, is finally set to go live this Sunday on November 12.
The welcoming of Bitcoin Gold (BTG) in the cryptocurrency markets took place in an unusual way. In the last week of October 2017, the second hard fork in the original Bitcoin was initiated activating the second derivative of Bitcoin known as Bitcoin Gold. During the time Bitcoin Gold was active after the hardfork, it was trading well above $500, however, the Bitcoin Gold website was a victim of the DDoS attacks just within 24 hours and soon later the BTG prices plunged by more than 70% to a low of $122.
The developer community backing the Bitcoin Gold has already announced that just like the Bitcoin Cash, BTG too will be distributed to everyone holding bitcoins at the time of the fork. However, some of the observers from the industry have criticised the BTG team for mining of blocks in isolation after the new network for created last month at the time of the fork. Moreover, a certain amount of coins are also said to be set aside for support development.
Now in the latest blog post on the official BTG website, they have announced that Bitcoin Gold will be launched this Sunday on Nov 12. A formal software client would be released on Nov 12 at 7:00 pm UTC time. In the wake of this official announcement, the Bitcoin Gold prices now have jumped by a whopping 40% and is currently trading at $196.39 as per coinmarketcap.com.
Bitcoin Gold is a project backed by developers of a particular community who wants to create a level playing field for miners. The community initially was split on the argument that the mining process in the original Bitcoin has been centralized and dominated by big institutions and the expensive mining hardware is discouraging new miners to participate in the process.
As a result, the Bitcoin Gold is backed by LightningASIC, a more decentralized, democratic mining infrastructure allowing miners from every end to participate in the mining and development process. There has been some skepticism considering the fact that it has taken longer for the BTG to release software tools after the hard fork has been initiated. However, in order to instill confidence back in BTG supporters, the team has sent out a message in its latest blog post.
The project backers said “We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the bitcoin gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time.”
Some of the essential changes and improvements that Bitcoin Gold will bring to the platform include:
- Equihash PoW change;
- Implementation of full Replay Protection (BIP143 SIGHASH) (protecting the community from attacks);
- Implementation of a Unique “G” and “A” prefixed Address Format (avoiding accidental coin transactions to incorrect destinations);
- Refinement of the per-block difficulty adjustment algorithm (to better respond to dynamic changes in hashing power);
- The usual minor tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements;
- Successful mining on several generations of Public Testnet;
- Network & pool integration