A General Guide on Bitcoin Gold (BTG)

What is Bitcoin Gold?

Bitcoin Gold is a community-driven project that was launched in 2017 with the goal of changing the concept of mining on the Bitcoin blockchain. The founders thought that the Bitcoin blockchain had become too centralized. The vast majority of Bitcoin was now being mined by large corporations with powerful mining computers. This presented a situation where these large companies controlled the Bitcoin network, which ultimately defeated the purpose of decentralized, peer-to-peer currencies, which Bitcoin was created for.

Bitcoin Gold was created to bring Bitcoin back to the people. Bitcoin Gold is an alternate Bitcoin blockchain fork implementing changes that make mining more equitable. Bitcoin Gold aims to create a network that makes it possible for anyone, wherever they are in the world, to participate in the mining process using widely available consumer hardware. This ensures any miner can partake in mining Bitcoin Gold rather than a few large companies.

The Bitcoin Gold organization supports the cryptocurrency space, and Bitcoin Gold in particular. A crypto endowment held in multi-signature time-locked wallets funds current and future operations. As a fork of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold contains the full Bitcoin transaction history up until the fork date, which includes the exact Bitcoin balances that were in wallets. All Bitcoin wallet balances immediately before the fork held an equivalent balance of Bitcoin Gold immediately after the fork. However, the original Bitcoin blockchain and the new Bitcoin Gold blockchain would have continued independently after the fork without affecting and impeding each other.

How Does Bitcoin Gold Work?

Bitcoin Gold uses a Proof-of-Work protocol which balances computing power with influence over the network. This means, the more work you do, the more likely that you’ll win a chance to add a block to the blockchain.

Bitcoin resembles vanilla Bitcoin in many respects, except its Proof-of-Work algorithm, called Equihash, which supporters believe cannot be sped up using custom hardware. A Bitcoin rival called ZCash also adopted Equihash. The idea behind Equihash is that memory more than computing power constraints the algorithm. Equihash has a list of pseudorandom bit strings that are derived from the block the miner is adding to the blockchain.

Team

The Bitcoin Gold Organization is an international team of over 20 people who come from diverse backgrounds and possess unique skills. The company was initially started by a group of six Co-Founders in the summer of 2017, led by Jack Liao. Strategic decisions are made by the board, with the team and advisors offering additional input.

Hang Yin (Lead Developer, Co-Founder, Board)

Martin Kuvandzhiev (Operations Lead, Co-Founder, Board)

Franco Niebles Jimeno (Lead Designer, Co-Founder, Board)

Alejandro Regojo (Project Manager, Co-Founder, Board)

Robert Kuhne (Co-Founder, Board)

Edward Iskra (Communications Director, Board)

Gustavo Del Rio (Community Coordinator)

Juan Guillermo Sánchez (Web Developer)

Marlon Plata (Designer)

Zhe Wang (China Operation Director)

Spas Vutov (Developer)

Joseph Groom (Technical Support)

Zhivko Kostadinov (General & Mining Support)

Where to Buy and Store Bitcoin Gold

For all cryptocurrencies, one major factor responsible for determining success is their availability on cryptocurrency exchanges. Today, currency exchanges make it possible for people to trade cryptos all over the world.

As of March 2018, Bitcoin Gold is trading live on the following exchanges: Binance, Bitfinex, Bithumb, HitBTC, Uphold, Changelly, Cex.io,YoBit, Gate.io, CoinSwitch, and many more.

There will be more exchanges that will offer Bitcoin Gold in the near future. Bitcoin Gold is available through several wallet services which include Trezor Wallet, Coinomi, Ledger Wallet, BTGWallet, Exodus, Guarda, Bitpie, Freewallet, and Kasse.

Competitors Info

Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is the first decentralized digital currency, which means it is not controlled by a single administrator or a central bank. The Bitcoin network is peer-to-peer and transactions take place directly between users via cryptography without any intermediary.

Bitcoin Cash:

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that was created in 2017. On November 15th 2018, Bitcoin Cash was split into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. It is sometimes referred to as Bcash. Bitcoin Cash enables new economies by providing low-fee transactions, permissionless spending, large business transactions and a fulfillment of the vision of Bitcoin to be “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash”.

Bitcoin SV:

Bitcoin SV (or Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) is a result of a hard fork of Bitcoin. It aims to bring back the values and technology of the original Bitcoin which include decentralization, enabling payments and trading strictly with cryptos, and elevating the network capacity. Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto is the leader of BSV.

Unique / Key Features against its competitors:

• BTG mainly seeks to implement segwit and lightning network to fix scaling.
• Offers unique address format.
• Block Size. 11.56 KBytes -> 1 MB max.
• Bitcoin Gold is focused on decentralization. The ASIC resistant algorithm it utilizes makes it possible for ordinary miners to participate in the mining process. This provides a greater opportunity to mine by prohibiting the use of specialized equipment.
• Because it was forked from Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Gold seeks to keep with the vision of Satoshi that cryptocurrency should be decentralized.
• Uses Equihash as Proof-of-Work algorithm compared to competitors who use SHA256.
• Bitcoin Gold will adopt a difficulty adjustment algorithm called DigiShield.
• All transactions and wallets on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain are pseudonymous. The identity of wallet owners is not shown by the blockchain, but owners can still see where their coins came from and where they are going.
• Even though Bitcoin Gold is relatively new, it is easily accessible on multiple exchange platforms compared to competitors.

Conclusion

Bitcoin Gold is a free, open source project that a small group of Bitcoin enthusiasts created to bring back the original aim of Bitcoin. Compared to other popular forks of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold was specifically designed, from the beginning, to inspire blockchain innovation and make decentralization a valued tenet again. Where the rest were birthed with competition and domination in mind, Bitcoin Gold was created with a desire to protect Bitcoin and ensure that not only does it maintain its position as the dominant cryptocurrency in the world, but continues to grow until every nation on the planet has it interwoven into the fabric of their economic life.