Considered as digital gold, Bitcoin has been through lot of changes in order to minimize the scaling problems and to facilitate faster transactions with lower transaction costs. The digital currency has seen more than 400% growth in 2017 alone and traded at all-time-high of $6100 as of October 20th 2017. The total trading volume of Bitcoin exceeded $100 billion which is way higher than the market-cap of big financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. There were two different proposals from various Bitcoin development communities and Start-ups regarding the improvement of Bitcoin transaction speed and to address the scaling issues. One major proposal was the proposal of another hard fork to introduce Bitcoin Gold which will reduce the dependency on expensive ASIC-based hardware for mining and can be mined using the easily available GPUs.
Bitcoin Gold was originated by Jack Liao who is the CEO of LightningASIC, a Hong Kong–based mining hardware firm. The official announcement came in August and soon there were several oppositions by large mining company regarding the introducing of another Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Gold also received a lot of attention from the general investors since anyone who owns Bitcoin (BTC) at the time of the split (October 24th) was to be rewarded with an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Gold. A similar procedure was followed during the launch of Bitcoin Cash in August where every user received an equivalent amount of free Bitcoin Cash for every Bitcoin owned by them.
Bitcoin Gold will modify the existing proof-of-work algorithm used by Bitcoin from SHA-256 which is mainly dominated by the large ASIC-based mining companies to EquiHash algorithm. This algorithm is already implemented by several Cryptocurrencies such as Zencash, zCash, Ethereum and Hush and can be mined using the usual Graphic cards (GPUs). According to the pitch made by supporters of Bitcoin Gold, it will return the bitcoin mining to home users and facilitate greater decentralization which was the main purpose of introducing Bitcoin. But some experts are still skeptical about how Bitcoin gold will decentralize mining as proposed by its developers, which includes the CEO of Satoshi Labs, Marek Palatinus.
Any bitcoins (BTC) that was held in your Cryptocurrency wallet during the fork would have granted you with an equal amount of BTG. This is applicable for users who have access to their private keys and is not applies only if you have access to the private keys of your wallet, so no exchange wallets apply. At present, 20% of the cryptocurrency exchanges have announced that they will support Bitcoin gold, but popular exchanges like Coinbase have stated that they won’t support Bitcoin gold due to skepticism about how the project information was shared to others. At present Bitcoin Gold is being traded at $ 116.07 at HitBTC and dropped by more than 50% during it’s first day of trading.
It looks as if Bitcoin will experience another split soon according to the New York Agreement, which is termed as SegWit2x. The upcoming SegWit2x whill involve updating the software rules which govern the Bitcoin network to allow block size of 2 MB. All these events create a volatility in the market price of Bitcoin which has faced several ups and downs in 2017 itself. It went through a massive downtrend after China announced the ICO ban and shutdown of Chinese bitcoin exchanges trading as low as $3200. Experienced Cryptocurrency Investors hope to make quick gains by using such sharp price fluctuations in the Cryptocurrency market.