Bitcoin Gold (BTG) - The Other Bitcoin Fork That's Making Gains
|With popular forks like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) dominating the headlines, many forget that there are other profitable Bitcoin hard forks out there that are making impressive gains in the market.
The past month has been hard on the altcoin market, with the majority of the top 50 cryptocurrencies suffering losses. Even the king of cryptocurrencies (BTC) is down three percent today as a bearish trend takes hold. While Bitcoin Gold hasn't managed to escape the bloodshed entirely, it has incurred considerably fewer losses than the 30 to 35 percent losses that many top coins have suffered.
Its strong resilience against the current bear market means BTG is now up by over 130 percent since the beginning of the year. This equates to the coin more than doubling its value from a low of $9.20 in early February to $25.70 today.
After testing the $30 resistance level last month, Bitcoin Gold has corrected slightly and is now consolidating around $25. With its relative strength index (RSI) in a strong bullish position, the asset will likely break above $30 on the next attempt. Support has proven strong at $24 and with BTG recently recording it's highest ever volume last week, it certainly seems to be building for an impressive rally.
Let's investigate Bitcoin Gold in a little more detail.
Bitcoin Gold (BTG) - "For everyone, for everything"
In October 2017, during the run-up to Bitcoin's record high of almost $20,000, the Bitcoin Gold hard fork was created by Jack Liao and several other developers. The reason behind the fork was in response to a believe that Bitcoin was becoming too centralized due to the use of 'ASICS' mining chips. An ASIC is a very powerful type of computer chip developed specifically for mining cryptocurrency and with its creation came huge, centralized mining operations that put small miners out of business.
This problem is noted in a paper put forward by the developers of Equihash, an asymmetric proof-of-work (PoW) mining protocol designed to remedy the centralization issue. "Users equipped with such hardware have an advantage over others, which has led the Bitcoin mining industry to concentrate in a few hardware farms of enormous size and high electricity consumption".
In an attempt to stay true to the original vision of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin Gold developers decided to implement the Equihash algorithm into a new fork that could not be mined using ASICS-based hardware. From the Bitcoin Gold FAQ:
"Changing the PoW (Proof-of-Work) algorithm from SHA-256 to Equihash means that specialized ASIC mining equipment designed for SHA-256 are unable to mine on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain. Equihash runs on commodity graphics cards, or GPUs, which are easily available to the public."
Using Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
The Bitcoin Gold tagline is "For everyone, for everything", as the asset was designed to be used for peer-to-peer transactions and everyday purchases. Unlike Bitcoin, which most people simply use for trading or investment, Bitcoin Gold is more accommodating to the retail sector.
Bitcoin Gold developers have created a proprietary system called BTGPay to facilitate the spending of BTG and additional payment services like Coinpayments enable retailers to easily integrate BTG payments into their systems. Bitcoin Gold users can browse the Cryptwerk directory listing to find a comprehensive list of merchants that accept BTG.
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