What is Bitcoin Gold? All You Need to Know About BTG

As an investor, you’d traditionally hold a portion of your portfolio in precious metals like gold. This provides a hedge against the losses stocks can take during a downward economic trend. This has proven effective and still is—but a new alternative is challenging this old-school capital preservation method. Bitcoin is proving to be an interesting asset for investors because it has been around long enough to gain recognition and support—it is being used in ways that appear to demonstrate a few trends. In a scenario where an individual possesses Bitcoin (BTC) at the juncture of the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) fork.

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1. In a scenario where an individual possesses Bitcoin (BTC) at the juncture of the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) fork.
2. However, it has yet to see the levels of adoption that Bitcoin has achieved.
3. Replay protection in Bitcoin Gold prevents this by ensuring that transactions made on the Bitcoin Gold network are invalid on the original Bitcoin network, and vice versa.

Bitcoin Gold was founded by a group of enthusiasts with diverse backgrounds and skills. He graduated with a degree in computer science from Fudan University in 2015. After three years with the tech giant, Hang Yin decided to venture into entrepreneurship by starting Bitcoin Gold.

This is often achieved by renting hash power from a third party to control the network. Caden has been involved with crypto since 2018, when he began investing, trading, and mining tokens. He took part in undergraduate research studying cryptoeconomics at the University of Michigan, where he will graduate Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s in economics in 2025.

This volatility is not inherent to gold for the reasons mentioned above, making it perhaps a safer asset. The coin’s history also includes significant controversy and skepticism. Bitcoin Gold’s security has been questioned due to two significant 51% attacks it suffered, ripple’s projected performance in 2021 and beyond once in 2018 and again in 2020. These attacks, enabling hackers to double-spend BTG, resulted in considerable financial losses and highlighted potential vulnerabilities in the network’s security, further adding to investor caution.

Bitcoin Gold Price Live Data

The news was related to the fact that this bank wanted to take on the custodial responsibilities of BTG Dol. Despite all of it, the project continues to have a lot of supporters, as shown by its continued prominence on coinmarketcap. Therefore, while BTG has its merits and potential, one must carefully evaluate these factors and conduct thorough due diligence.

Second layers and side chains enable technologies like smart contracts which can run at blazing speeds, secured by the underlying BTG mainchain. ASICs tend to monopolize mining to a few big players, but GPU mining means anyone can mine again – restoring decentralization and independence. GPU mining rewards go to individuals worldwide, instead of mostly to ASIC warehouse owners, recreating network effects that Bitcoin used to have. BTG is a cryptocurrency with Bitcoin fundamentals, mined on common GPUs instead of specialty ASICs.

Therefore, it’s safe to say that it isn’t the most secure blockchain out there at the moment. It is an open source, decentralized digital currency without a central bank or intermediary that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer Bitcoin Gold network. Out of the total amount of BTG tokens, 30% went towards the development of the blockchain and the project.

One primary concern for investors looking toward Bitcoin as a haven is its liquidity. The top few cryptocurrencies by market cap are generally very liquid assets because they have higher trading volumes and more capital invested in them; less popular cryptocurrencies are much less liquid. But there are limits to its liquidity depending on the platform you use. The Replay Protection is an important safety feature implemented in Bitcoin Gold to protect users’ transactions. In the context of a hard fork, without replay protection, it is possible that a transaction on one chain could be “replayed” on the other chain, causing users to lose funds potentially. It was subjected to a significant DDoS attack on its cloud site on the day it launched in October 2017.

Gold has historically been used in many applications—currency, luxury items, specialized applications in dentistry, electronics, how to buy storm token and much more. This cross-functional utility has given gold its ability to maintain value when other asset values fall. In an interesting episode that happened in 2021, Bitcoin Gold (BTG) saw an unanticipated surge of 173% in its value, a phenomenon largely attributed to a case of mistaken identity. Traders seemingly confused BTG Pactual Bank – a prominent investment bank in Latin America that shares the ‘BTG’ ticker – with Bitcoin Gold, leading to the inadvertent price hike.

What Is Bitcoin Gold (BTG)?

Because of this, it is very difficult to build custom hardware in order to mine, which takes us back to the fact that ASIC miners cannot be used to mine on the BTG blockchain. Weiss Research, an investment research firm that rates cryptocurrencies, has given Bitcoin Gold an overall rating of “C-“, a technology and adoption rating of “C”, and a market performance rating of “E+”. Bitcoin Gold is mainly used as a form of payment and is a mineable cryptocurrency.

He is experienced with DeFi technology and multiple blockchains, currently investing in Ethereum and Bitcoin. They say that the only real difference between the chains is the mining algorithm. Because they are considered to be fairly similar, most adoption cases will be with Bitcoin, as it has a much higher volume and a market cap over 1,200 times the size of Bitcoin Gold’s. It uses a unique mining algorithm that may prove to be useful in the future. This algorithm sets it apart from other cryptocurrencies and can make your crypto portfolio more diverse. Bitcoin Gold is a liquid asset, and between 2 to 5% of its total market capitalization is traded hands every day.

Future of Bitcoin Gold

Therefore, Bitcoin Gold was designed so that it could not be mined by ASICs. Instead, it could be mined using GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), opening up the mining opportunity to regular individuals. While GPUs aren’t super cheap, they’re certainly a lot more affordable than ASIC miners in most cases. While you can technically mine Bitcoin using a GPU, it’s virtually impossible these days, which isn’t the case with Bitcoin Gold. By 2017, Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, proof of work, favored a small number of miners, so regular individuals and beginners didn’t stand much of a chance of getting in on the mining action. In this sense, the system was becoming a little too biased and centralized.

Like most cryptocurrencies designed to be used as payment methods, BTG is not backed by any assets, businesses, or people. Developers noted that they planned to shift from a board-based governance structure to a modern DAO-based model. Updates to the core items in their tech stack were underway, and updates to some of these items—like their explorers and ElectrumG, were being upgraded. BTG noted that while transaction volumes and fees at the moment don’t necessitate a layer-2 lightning network solution just yet, it’s on their radar. It’s difficult to say what will happen to Bitcoin Gold over the long term.

The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile and investments should always be made based on individual risk tolerance and financial circumstances, rather than assumptions based on namesake alone. According to the short selling bitcoin Bitcoin Gold website, as of Nov. 2, 2023, the cryptocurrency was trading live on 34 exchanges. However, of the exchanges listed in November 2023, it is only active on Bithumb, Uphold, Unocoin, and Coinone. One of the primary goals of Bitcoin Gold was to change the algorithm by which the cryptocurrency itself is mined, meaning that the mining process cannot be run faster on specialized equipment than on standard computer systems. Bitcoin Gold, on the other hand, uses the Equihash proof of work mechanism. In short, this mechanism makes it much harder to generate a proof than it is to verify one.

The most profitable mining ventures are often those that pool together many miners, each of which requires expensive, special equipment. On the surface, the idea of “making Bitcoin decentralized again” may seem counterintuitive. Like all other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized already; it is not linked with any central bank, a particular country, or a government body. Bitcoin mining hardware is known as an ASIC (Application-Specific Integration Circuits) miner and can cost thousands of dollars. Because of this, Bitcoin mining was a pretty exclusive venture that you could only get involved in if you had a big wad of cash to spare. © 2024 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions.