Review on Bitcoin Gold by Saparov Meylis

Bitcoin Gold is a fork of the Bitcoin block. At block 491407, Bitcoin Gold miners started creating blocks with a new health check algorithm and this led to the bifurcation of the Bitcoin blockchain.

The original bitcoin blockchain will continue unchanged, but the new blockchain branch will separate from the original chain. The new branch is a separate blockchain with the same transaction history as Bitcoin, up to the fork, but then deviates from it. As a result of this process, a new cryptocurrency was born.

The goal of Bitcoin Gold is to make Bitcoin deblocking decentralized again. Satoshi Nakamoto's idealistic vision of "one vote per processor" has been replaced by a reality where a very small number of actors dominate the production and distribution of mining equipment, some of whom engage in abusive practices against individual miners of the network as a whole.

By changing the Bitcoin algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash, all specialized SHA256 mining hardware will be obsolete for mining the Bitcoin gold blockchain.

Thus, Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for countless new people around the world to participate in the mining process with widely available consumer equipment that is produced and distributed by reputable large corporations. More decentralized.

Bitcoin Gold support

The official website of the Bitcoin Gold project lists 28 crypto exchanges that support transactions in BTG. These include: Bittrex, HitBTC, Bitfinex, Binance, YoBit, Change Now, Tdax, and many other platforms.

Crypto wallets that support BTG: Trezor Wallet, Ledger Wallet, Coinomi, Bitpie, Guarda, Freewallet. By the way, on January 7, an announcement about the launch of its own wallet, BTGWallet.online, appeared on the official website.

According to BTG founder Jack Liao, the mining giants have too much influence on the network and pose a threat to Bitcoin. Its main idea was to make the network more decentralized than Bitcoin.

Immediately after the fork, the new cryptocurrency had its own slogan - "Make Bitcoin decentalized again" ("Let's make Bitcoin decentralized again"). However, experts believe that GPU mining will not lead to more decentralization, since the graphics card markets are controlled by large companies.

Currently, Bitcoin mining is completely dependent on ASIC hardware, which is mainly produced by companies such as Bitmain, Bitfury, and Canaan.

This is largely due to the use of the Proof-of-Work algorithm and the SHA-256 algorithm in the bitcoin network - it is quite simple and does not require a lot of RAM for calculations, but requires powerful processors.

Equihash, by contrast, is a rather complex hashing function and requires a lot of RAM to execute. This means that the production of ASICs for Equihash will be much more expensive, and their performance will not be much higher than GPUs. This removes the benefits of ASICs in Bitcoin Gold mining.