Published on Feb 21, 2020
Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of the open source cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The fork occurred on 24 October 2017, at block height 491407.[2][3][4] The stated purpose of the fork is to restore GPU mining functionality to Bitcoin, as opposed to specialized ASICs with entry prices in the thousands of dollars
Bitcoin gold uses a SHA-256 proof-of-work algorithm to the Equihash ASIC-resistant algorithm, originally from Zcash.[7] The Bitcoin Gold team used ‘post-mine’ - a mining of 100,000 coins after the fork had already occurred. The team did this via a rapid mining of approximately 8,000 blocks at 12.5 BTG per block. The bulk of premined coins have been placed into an ‘endowment’, and according to the developers will be used to grow and maintain the BTG ecosystem. However, of the 100K coins, some five percent were set aside as a bonus for the team, or about 833 coins for each of the six members
A few days after the launch of the mainnet miners started accusing developer Martin Kuvandzhiev (StarbugBG) of adding a hidden 0.5% mining fee in the z-nomp code fork the team suggested to use. Suprnova and other mining pools allegedly found the hidden fee and removed it after examining the code causing some to speculate that the removal was related to why many found blocks didn't show up as paid to the finder and why Suprnova's chain was out of sync.
The online wallet provider mybtgwallet.com prompted users to enter their private keys or recovery seeds. An analysis revealed that the code contained a line to convert the entered passphrases into Google Analytics cookies that could later be retrieved
Bitcoin Gold decentralizes mining by adopting a PoW algorithm, Equihash, which cannot be run faster on the specialty equipment used for Bitcoin mining (ASIC miners.) This gives ordinary users a fair opportunity to mine with ubiquitous GPUs.
Hard forking Bitcoin’s blockchain fairly and efficiently distributes a new digital asset immediately to people all over the world who have interest in cryptocoins. Other methods, such as creating coins with a new genesis block, concentrate ownership within a small group.
To ensure the safety of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin Gold has implemented full replay protection and unique wallet addresses, essential features that protect users and their coins from several kinds of accidents and malicious threats.
Bitcoin Gold is a free open source software project that is built by volunteer developers and supported by a rapidly growing community of Bitcoin enthusiasts that stretches around the globe.
