1 Level
17 Review
19 Karma
Review on Bitcoin Gold by Celil Ozturk
This seems a bit redundant on the surface. Isn’t Bitcoin already decentralized…
This seems a bit redundant on the surface. Isn’t Bitcoin already decentralized? It doesn’t have links to any government, central bank, or any specific country. It is a global currency, and is controlled by the community.
While all that is true, the developers of Bitcoin Gold weren’t concerned with the question of central issuance of Bitcoin. Rather they worried about the mining process and the rise of large ASIC mining operations, who were increasingly controlling the hash power of the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin Gold’s developers proposed the fork in order to move to the Equihash consensus algorithm, and make Bitcoin Gold ASIC resistant, thereby putting the mining hash power back in the hands of individuals to a large extent.
This means that the solo miner, those who wish to simply mine on their own from home, were forced to spend large amounts of money to build their own super-powerful mining rigs. Those who didn’t choose to do this would be passed over in the mining process as their computers simply didn’t have the computational power to solve a block before the professional systems. Or they could join mining pools, further centralizing Bitcoin mining themselves.
Bitcoin Gold took as one of its central goals to change the mining algorithm, and in so doing prohibit the use of specialized ASIC chips in mining. This keeps the large mining operations from dominating the mining process, and allows solo miners to continue mining with only their computers GPU.
As anyone who’s been involved with cryptocurrencies knows, one of the primary concerns users have is with security. There is always the threat of hackers and bad actors lurking in the background.
This need for security prompted Bitcoin Gold’s creators to add additional security measures to the coin right from the date of the hard fork. One of these measures was to create unique wallet addresses for Bitcoin Gold, while the other was to institute replay protection for the coin to avoid double spending.
Finally, transparency was added by making Bitcoin Gold open-source software, which is primarily being developed by volunteers from around the globe. The fact that the source code for the project is freely available is a strong draw for potential Bitcoin Gold users and investors. You can see the global distribution even of the official Bitcoin Gold team here.
Pros
- Even Bitcoin is expecting to see several forks in 2018, and these come after the several forks already completed last year. One of the more controversial of these forks was the October Bitcoin Gold fork.
Cons
- Even Bitcoin is expecting to see several forks in 2018, and these come after the several forks already completed last year. One of the more controversial of these forks was the October Bitcoin Gold fork.
