Bitcoin gold
Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of the original Bitcoin brought by Jack Liao in the year 2017. If you want to learn about a hard fork, check out this article linked at the end of the article. It gives you a detailed idea about what is a hard fork.
There is a total supply of 21,000,000 Bitcoin Gold in the crypto ecosystem.
The history behind bitcoin gold
Initially, Bitcoin was mined by individuals on computers with ASICS (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). ASIC is a hardware that allows performing calculations multiple times faster than normal laptops. This meant that regular desktops which did not have ASIC were useless to bitcoin miners.
Soon the companies that manufactured ASIC and the operations that could afford them monopolized. This means that the ASIC manufacturers partnered with some specific big bitcoin mining houses. This led to the monopolization of bitcoin mining.
Such monopolization was anything but the demolition of a decentralized monetary system, which was the original idea behind the creation of Bitcoin. Thus, Bitcoin Gold was created to restore decentralization in the Bitcoin space.
What changes have bitcoin gold brought about in the fundamental bitcoin?
Jack Liao, the founder of Bitcoin Gold, brought a new algorithm into the Bitcoin ecosystem called Equihash.
By this algorithm, miners are required to use hardware with graphic processors rather than ASICs. Such hardware is usually found in regular laptops. This once again allowed individuals and businesses access to bitcoin mining. Thus, re-establishing decentralization which was the original base for Cryptocurrencies.
The previous ASIC-enabled mining provided monopoly power over mining to giant warehouses.
Equihash enabled common GPU mining from regular desktops rather than ASIC specialty supercomputers.
The tagline of the official BITCOIN GOLD page states: “Bitcoin Gold for everyone, for everything”
Bitcoin Gold
What is the vision of bitcoin gold?
BTG or Bitcoin Gold works in close compatibility with Bitcoin that has Segwit and Lightning Network protocols, but at the same time, not utilizing resources like Bitcoin hash power or contending for the “real Bitcoin” title.
Bitcoin Gold developers claim it as a friendly fork that opens doors for new developers and new technologies building on a bitcoin space.
Node space
As of 9th July 2022, the Bitcoin Gold Nodes Distribution states that they have 77 nodes in distribution worldwide.
The highest concentration of nodes is found in France with16 nodes followed by Germany with 15 nodes and the United States with 10 nodes.
The node list is ever-changing due to restarts of the crawler.
Where can you buy bitcoin gold (BTG)?
BTG is available on all the major bitcoin exchanges around the world.
Some of them are Binance, OKX, Huobi Global, Gate.io, Bybit, WazirX, CoinDCX, Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken.