Bitcoin Gold Blockchain Fork Expected To Debut This Weekend

Blockchain, Investing, News | November 10, 2017 By:

Bitcoin Gold, which plans to fork the existing bitcoin blockchain, will go live this weekend. A blog post by its developers detailed plans.

The new cryptocurrency hopes to address complaints raised by some in the developer community about individual bitcoin miners, who have proved contentious foes of changes to the bitcoin blockchain and, in some cases, have instituted methods that are beyond the reach of ordinary miners, such as specialized mining chips.

The project’s website suffered a DDos (digital denial of service) attack from hostiles when it was first announced, a retaliation from some in the developer community angered at the project. The main initiator is Hong Kong-based LightningAsic CEO Jack Liao, who has been openly critical about the current state of bitcoin mining companies and individuals.

The fork will not affect the existing bitcoin blockchain, but will offer an entirely new branch. The goal is to open up mining to more people rather than an elite group of miners.

The new client is expected to be availabe for download at 7 PM UTC on Nov. 12. Not every exchange will support its roll-out. Most prominently, Coinbase, the largest US exchange, said it would not initially support Bitcoin Gold, although it claimed the same thing about Bitcoin Cash and later relented when that decision proved unpopular.

“We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets,” said the Bitcoin Gold blog post. “Besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the Bitcoin Gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time. Thank you to all those who have donated their hash power to this effort! We’d also like to extend our gratitude to all those service providers who have been working so hard with us to prepare a fully functional ecosystem at launch.

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