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Bitcoin Gold

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Bitcoin Gold
Denominations
CodeBTG
Development
Initial release0.15.0.1 / 12 November 2017 (6 years ago) (2017-11-12)
Latest release0.15.0.2 / 6 January 2018 (6 years ago) (2018-01-06)
Code repositorygithub.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU
Development statusActive
Project fork ofBitcoin
Written inC++, Qt
Operating systemWindows, OS X, Linux
Developer(s)Bitcoin Gold Organization
Source modelOpen source
LicenseMIT License
Ledger
Ledger start3 January 2009 (15 years ago) (2009-01-03)
Timestamping schemeProof-of-work
Hash functionEquihash
Block reward12.5 BTG (approximately to mid 2020), halved approximately every four years
Block time10 minutes
Block explorerBitcoinGold Explorer BTG EXPLORER BTGexp.com
Circulating supply17,000,000 BTG (as of 26 April 2018) [1]
Supply limit21,000,000 BTG
Website
Websitebitcoingold.org

Bitcoin Gold is a distributed digital currency. It is a hard fork of Bitcoin, the open source cryptocurrency. The stated purpose of the hard fork is to restore the mining functionality with common Graphics Processing Units (GPU), in place of mining with specialized ASIC (customized chipsets), used to mine Bitcoin.

A central part of the bitcoin process, mining, is being controlled by a few manufacturers who sell their products to a select group of industrialized miners, centralizing the mining task and breaking with one of the core values of bitcoin - decentralization[2]. ASIC resistant GPU powered mining provides a solution, as this kind of hardware is ubiquitous, and anyone can start mining with a standard, off-the-shelf laptop computer.

Bitcoin Gold was hit by double-spending attack on May 18th, 2018.[3][4]

The fork

The hard fork occurred on October 24th, 2017, at block height 491407.[5][6] The Bitcoin Gold team used ‘post-mine’ - a mining of 100,000 coins after the fork had already occurred. The team did this via a rapid mining of approximately 8,000 blocks at 12.5 BTG per block. The bulk of premined coins have been placed into an ‘endowment’, and according to the developers will be used to grow and maintain the BTG ecosystem. However, of the 100K coins, some five percent were set aside as a bonus for the team, or about 833 coins for each of the six members.[7]

Differences from Bitcoin

Bitcoin gold uses the memory hard equihash as proof-of-work algorithm instead of the sha-256.[8]. But for the rest, the project follows the guidelines of the Bitcoin core project.

May 2018 attack

In 2018 Bitcoin Gold (and two other cryptocurrencies) were hit a by a successful 51% hashing attack by an unknown actor, in which exchanges lost estimated $18m.[9]

References

  1. ^ "Bitcoin Gold (BTG) price, charts, market cap, and other metrics - CoinMarketCap". coinmarketcap.com.
  2. ^ "Bitmain's Mining Monopoly Compromises Bitcoin's Decentralized Nature". Cointelegraph. 2017-08-30. Retrieved 2018-04-08.
  3. ^ "Edward Iskra, Bitcoin Gold director of communications first admonished clients about the attack on May 18, reporting that an evil-minded miner was using the exploit to steal means from cryptocurrency exchanges", https://hype.codes/bitcoin-gold-hit-malicious-miners-double-spend-attack
  4. ^ "According to a post on the Bitcoin Gold forums, the attacks have started taking place since last Friday, May 18.", https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-makes-over-18-million-in-double-spend-attack-on-bitcoin-gold-network/
  5. ^ "Block #491407".
  6. ^ "Bitcoin Gold Roadmap" (PDF). btcgpu.org.
  7. ^ "Bitcoin Gold Clarifies Premine Endowment". Cointelegraph. 19 November 2017.
  8. ^ Aaron van Wirdum (Oct 11, 2017). "Bitcoin Gold Is About to Trial an ASIC-Resistant Bitcoin Fork". BitcoinMagazine.
  9. ^ "Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions". CCN. 2018-05-23. Retrieved 2018-05-24.
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