In October, the list of cryptocurrencies got longer thanks to a new digital currency. Bitcoin developers announced Bitcoin Gold (BTG), and they promise that mining it will be much easier than mining the conventional version of Bitcoin. So, Bitcoin is going to get another younger brother in the coming days. Actually, the corresponding fork (separating Bitcoin chains in the blockchain) was scheduled for October 26th. If everything goes right, BTG may reach the same success that Bitcoin Cash got not so long ago. For those of you who don’t know, Bitcoin Cash also came into existence as the result of forking in August 2017. Later on it became the world’s 4th biggest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization.
At this point, Bitcoin’s market cap is around 95 billion dollars. Experts say that many developers thought about creating another Bitcoin peer while watching the huge success gained by Bitcoin. The international community has been discussing several new versions of Bitcoin, however Bitcoin Cash seems to be the only success for now.
Those who advocate the creation of Bitcoin Gold say that this is an attempt to bring the digital gold status back to Bitcoin since the world’s biggest digital currency has been losing it so far. The forking was initiated by a developer team led by Jack Liao (CEO of LightningASIC, a major Honk-Kong-based mining firm). The founder of cryptobank Wirkex Pavel Matveev assumes that the key idea of forking is to create another Bitcoin version so as to let more people mine it and therefore reduce the impact of big-scale mining firms on the industry and the market situation in general.
Indeed, big-scale miners do play the key role in mining digital currencies. Since they use costly hardware, the get a significant competitive edge over small-scale retail miners. Bitcoin World developers are planning to introduce a new algorithm to destroy the market monopoly of big-scale miners. They will be able to mine Bitcoin Gold using standard GPUs, which will make mining affordable and accessible to most of the players out there.
Everyone seems to be waiting for Bitcoin Gold but the community still doesn’t understand how this is going to be put into practice. Most of them assume that all of the Bitcoin users will get access to Bitcoin Gold irrespective of the type of their wallets. At this point, the forking is reported to have been support by such exchanges as Bitexchange, Coinbase, and Bitstar. However, nobody knows which wallets are going to be of high priority to those arranging the process.
Bitcoin Gold is Expected to Have a Bright Future
Still, nobody knows the initial cost of the new digital currency. Some experts expect it to follow in Bitcoin Cash’s footsteps and start with something around $300. Others say it may go up to $500 and even $1000.
The forthcoming forking has already influenced the BTC exchange rate. NordFX analysts report that BTC has nearly doubled over the last 4 weeks. A couple of days ago, Bitcoin set another all-time high around $6200 even though now it’s trading around $5700. Bitcoin has always been a rather volatile digital currency but it keeps on setting new all-time high over and over again. Experts say that investors started loading up on Bitcoin in order to be able to get free Bitcoin Gold coins upon launching. At the same time, they say that $6000 is not the limit. However, it’s always a good idea to trust professionals and to be cautious when dealing with digital currencies.
