Bitcoin Gold Fork – Learn [New Strategies] to 2X Your Bitcoins

Written by Felix Kirui - Reviewed by Coin Review Team

Published: Jul 23, 2018 | Last Updated: Mar 8, 2019

The vital insights on the working of BTG and all the safety steps you need to know.

2025-01-23T12:53:14+00:00

What is Bitcoin Gold (BTG)?

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency forked to create Bitcoin Gold, in a bid to reduce the coin’s mining monopoly.

Mining has been a significant aspect of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since the creation of bitcoin (BTC).

Since then, the technology behind mining coins has gone through a major progress, but it remains very expensive for most hobbyists.

In our Bitcoin Gold review, we established that Bitcoin Gold (BTG) purposes to be a solution to the mining monopolization by professional businesses.

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It aims to achieve this by changing the algorithm that is currently used to solve blocks.

Instead of using the sha-256 algorithm that the parent Bitcoin uses, Bitcoin Gold uses equihash as proof-of-work.

The project utilizes the guidelines from the Bitcoin core project for everything else.

The goal of the project is to improve the protocol: much like any other bitcoin hard fork.

In appearance, however, Bitcoin Gold looks like it was specifically designed to challenge Bitcoin Cash.

What is Bitcoin Fork?

In case you are not accustomed to cryptocurrencies, but you have done some research, you might have come across bitcoin forks and the great debate it has recently sparked.

Most Bitcoin reviews agree that forks characterize alterations made to the bitcoin protocol that deem the previous ones either valid or invalid.

They are merely protocol upgrades. There are two types of forks:

1. hard fork
2. soft fork

Both types of forks can represent drastic changes to the underlying protocol, but they majorly differ from each other in two ways.

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A soft fork is an alteration which is backward compatible. This simply means that the new and legacy protocol are interoperable.

Where a soft fork is reinforced by a minority of hash power, chances of the fork becoming the shortest chain and ultimately getting orphaned by the network is high. Alternatively, it could act like a hard fork, and the other chain could splinter off.

So far, soft forks have been the most common option for upgrading the Bitcoin blockchain because it is argued that they pose a lower risk of completely splitting the network.

On the other hand, a hard fork facilitates rule changes to the software, without the aspect of backward compatibility.

A hard fork results in a permanent split from the legacy protocol, resulting in the creation of two blockchain coins.

The problem with this type is that in the event of a political impasse, a group may decide to stick to the legend protocol. After a hard fork, the hash rate supporting the old chain becomes irrelevant.

Despite this, the rule set is still alleged to have value, and as result, miners still want to mine it and developers are willing to support it.

What Makes BTG Different from BTC?

While bitcoin gold was created using the same technology as bitcoin, the two differ on a number of fronts, one is its distribution.

	Bitcoin	Bitcoin Gold
Money supply	21 million	21 million
Proof of work type	ASIC	GPU
Block time	10 minutes	10 minutes
Difficulty adjustment	2 weeks	Each block
Segwit	Yes	No
Replay protection	–	Yes
Unique address format	–	In future release

Claiming Bitcoin Gold

Anyone who owned bitcoins before October 24th is automatically entitled to 1:1 BTG distribution. How, then, do you gain access to your BTG? There are two ways of claiming your BTG;

Option 1
Among the ways that people have so far used to get control of their BTG tokens is through Coinomi. If you’re an enthusiast of cryptocurrency wallet reviews, you could have read about it in a post.

This wallet is accessible on Google Play Store. Essentially, it allows a user to transfer bitcoins from their primary wallet into a newly created one. In addition, it allows users to import seed from the old wallet into Coinomi.

With these guidelines, you can easily toggle BTG in the coinomi wallet and claim the tokens from the previous wallets seed.

Option 2
The other way would be to opt for Trezor. If your bitcoins are in a Trezor or Ledger hardware wallet, then you’re even luckier.

These companies have come up with a splitting feature for the user’s convenience. A user on Trezor has to choose between the Legacy or Segwit account to be scanned.

In a matter of minutes, details of the number of BTGs in the wallet will be displayed on the page, requiring users to move them out to different addresses.

Users can add a BTG wallet or an exchange wallet address, besides the hardware wallet provided by Trezor.

Whatever wallet you use for your crypto asset management, be sure to find out how to access your BTG tokens.

Why Should You Invest in BTG?

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is an altcoin deserving serious consideration for investment, despite the fact that compared to its siblings forked from bitcoin, it doesn’t get as much attention. Currently the coin costs around $33, making it look like a hoax.

However, the coin was valued at around $59 around 2 months ago, going well above $100 in the months before that. As a result, buying and HODLing Bitcoin Gold (BTG) right now is going to accrue great returns in the future.

When the crypto market resumes it’s run, as it always does, the Bitcoin Gold will rise in value, perhaps reaching the $100 mark to reclaim its glory as one of the top ranking coins.

Why and When did Bitcoin Gold Fork Happen?

The main decision to fork out BTC came about as a result of mining. The team behind the fork had a goal of decentralizing mining, and as a result, make it easier to mine Bitcoin using GPU equipment as opposed to the specialized and costly ASICs.

The main issue was that many average miners were locked out of ASICs because they couldn’t afford it. The forking of Bitcoin officially took place at block height 491407 on 24 October 2017.

The Bitcoin Gold team used ‘post-mine’ – a mining of 100,000 coins after the fork was completed. They achieved this through rapid mining of about already occurred. The team did this via a rapid mining of about 8,000 blocks, generating 12.5 BTG.

To find out insider news, before-the-public, I advise you to bookmark www.blockchainwhispers.com

Majority of the premined coins have been stored away in an ‘endowment’. As per the developers, these coins will be used to maintain and grow the BTG ecosystem. Even so, out of the 100k coins available, some 5% were put aside for the team, coming down to about 833 coins per member of the six-person team.

How Bitcoin Mining became Centralized?

In 2014, the Bitcoin community was sent into a fright by Ghash.io- a major mining pool back then- that held more than 51% of the network’s hash rate.

Ever since then, Bitcoin communities began to push pool owners and developers to create solutions that would ensure the decentralization of Bitcoin mining.

It was realized that allowing a big percentage of the hash power to be controlled by a single entity would make Bitcoin similar to the currencies and payment systems that it was striving to improve on.

Control of over 51% of the network hash power, similar to that of Ghash.io, gives one the power to double spend, block transactions and alter consensus rules.

Nonetheless, big mining pools continue to dominate the harsh rate distribution, making mining increasingly centralized. Today, most of the network is controlled by 10 mining pools. 75% of the hash rate is controlled by the largest four, while the top two control over 50%.

Doubling your Bitcoins?

Bitcoin Gold “hard fork” meant “free coins” or doubling coins for the holders of Bitcoin. Conversely, doubling of coins does not directly translate to doubling of value.

This is due to the fact that after a hard fork, the value of both coins is dependent on market supply/demand and user sentiment.

If you owned bitcoin around the time that block 491,407 happened, then technically speaking, you have Bitcoin Gold. The BTG initial coin distribution method is identical to the one used with Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Every Bitcoin holder who has BTC private keys on block 491 407 will get Bitcoin Gold at the rates of 1 BTC = 1 BTG. You, however, need to control the BTC private keys for you to make transactions with Bitcoin Gold.

After the fork, you can move out or spend your Bitcoins. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold were directly connected when a snapshot was taken at block 491,407. The two coins are regarded as completely different coins moving forward.

Suppose you had some Bitcoins in an exchange /wallet that supported the fork at block 491,407, it’s important that you follow the aforementioned procedure (‘claiming Bitcoin Gold’) to access your coins.

Granted, there are some wallets that will give you direct access to your coins while others will require some extra technical steps before getting you there. Here’s a list of the wallets that support both the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold side by side.

By and large, judging from what we have so far seen online, Bitcoin Gold looks like a minimalist fork of bitcoin, built in the spirit of Litecoin.

There are very minor conservative changes to it. However, the changes implemented on BTG are crucially important and could propel it well beyond its peers in the near future.

Image Credits
Feature Image Credit: shutterstock.com
Inpost Image Credit: shutterstock.com

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Disclaimer

The writer’s views are expressed as a personal opinion and are for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.