Bitcoin Gold Fork Coming: How To Double Your Bitcoins

It has been only 9 weeks since the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, and we are again discussing another Bitcoin hard fork.
In this article, I intend to cover everything you need to know about the upcoming Bitcoin hard fork and how to prepare and benefit from it by doubling you coin holdings.

Wowowow… double!!

Some of you may think this is a good thing as your value will also double!

Note: Doubling of coins does not mean doubling of value, because after a hard fork, the value of both versions of coins are determined based on user sentiments and demand/supply in the market.

So keeping that point in mind, let’s get started…

Who Is Doing This Fork And When Is It Happening?

The Bitcoin Gold project is being driven by some developers, miners, and their head Jack Liao, the CEO of the Hong Kong-based mining equipment manufacturing company, LightningAsic.
But the official date for the fork is mentioned as 2017-10-25 (25th October 2017) but better to follow the block height which is block 491407.

Why Is It Happening?

This is a community-driven hard fork without any consensus voting. It is primarily being driven by a few who believe that the original Bitcoin mining system has become centralized and is monopolized by a handful of mining companies.

They believe this because of ASIC miners which provide a very strong entry barrier for an average user or miner like you and me.

And now, these hard fork supporters want to change that and make the process more decentralized.

How Do BTG Supporters Want To Change This Centralization Problem?

BTG (i.e. Bitcoin Gold) advocates have decided to solve this problem by forking Bitcoin on 25th October by changing its original protocol.

Specifically, to combat the mining centralization problem, the BTG developers are implementing a different mining algorithm altogether that will be resistant to ASIC chips called Equihash.

This will make ASIC miners irrelevant for mining Bitcoin Gold because, with the implementation of Equihash, Bitcoin Gold will be mineable simply by using cheap GPUs.

Note: Currently, Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 mining algorithm (read about SHA-256).
What’s Their Other Agenda?

Their other agenda is to save Bitcoin in case something happens to it in the future, as they claim will.

Also, I think they want to compete with other GPU minable cryptocurrencies like Zcash, Ethereum, and Monero.

And with Ethereum moving to POS consensus, this is a kind of masterstroke for this Bitcoin-branded coin (BTG) because then those Ethereum mining people will have to switch to either BTG or Zcash or another GPU minable currency in the future.

But they know that they are not competing with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as stated by their lead developer in a conversation with Bitcoin.com.

Features of Bitcoin Gold (BTG)

Bitcoin Gold doesn’t bring many features with it, but…

BTG will be based on Equihash so it will be GPU minable.
BTG will have inbuilt replay protection because it is a direct fork of BTC.
BTG will have a variable difficulty that will change per block. (Good thing for GPU miners.)
And looks like BTG will have a pool of pre-mined coins for 16,000 blocks.

Apart from these, there will be no changes like block size adjustment.

And BTG will be following the suit of the original BTC core developers for the future betterment of their coin because they believe that’s the secure way.

Future Of BTG

The future of BTG isn’t clear yet. But if the fork happens, BTG will likely have some market value and will definitely steal away some hash power from GPU miners.

On the other hand, we really need exchanges and wallets to support this Bitcoin Gold fork; otherwise, it will have a hard time finding any value.

And as the fork time approaches, I will keep updating this article will more information on Bitcoin Gold and which wallets/exchanges are actually supporting it.

Last but not least, don’t fall prey to fake websites/wallets demanding your private keys to let you access your BTG.