The Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork Explained
Bitcoin Gold (BTG/Bgold) is an upcoming hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain that’s scheduled to occur on October 25 . Bgold has nothing to do with the yellow metal, so it shouldn’t be confused with BitGold, the gold investment and payments firm. Bgold is equally unrelatedf to both the previous hard fork, Bitcoin Cash (BCH/Bcash), which occurred on August 1 , and the upcoming SegWit2x (S2X/Bizcoin) hard fork, which is scheduled for mid-November. Why Bitcoin Gold? Bitcoin Gold will alter Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm from SHA-256, which is currently dominated mostly by Chinese ASIC miners, to the Equihash algorithm . Equihash is also employed by the Ethereum, zCash (Classic), Zencash, and Hush cryptocurrencies. Equihash is mostly mined by graphics cards (GPUs). According to the Bgold pitch, returning Bitcoin mining to home users will bring forth greater decentralization. However, massive Russian and Japanese Bitcoin mining operations have been planned ...