Bitcoin Gold, the second major fork of Bitcoin after the launch of Bitcoin Cash, is now available to mine although worries about its technical robustness still linger, according to Coin Telegraph.
Bitcoin Gold’s issuance had been married by a scam using the Twitter handle @bitcoingolds as a basis to trick migrating users into handing over cryptocurrency. The developer’s website, Bitcoingold.org, was also targeted in a denial-of-service attack – a coordinated attempt to overload a web server with too many page requests.
“A massive attack was made in an apparent effort to disrupt the mainnet launch, but the Bitcoin Gold team managed to get the network up and running … albeit a little later than planned,” according to Bitcoingold.org.
Bitcoingold.org published software for the breakaway cryptocurrency and released the code on GitHub, Coindesk reported.
“The process of distributing the software – no small feat in a permissionless, open-ended environment – came with some complications,” according to Coindesk. “Some users had problems connecting their nodes to other computers on the network. Others allege they were receiving spam messages containing links to fake (and potentially malevolent) software clients.”
Bitcoin Gold is an altcoin and not affiliated with the Bitcoin Core chain -- the original version of Bitcoin, Coindesk warned. "Purchasing Bitcoin Gold does not mean that you hold Bitcoin," it said.
Bitcoin Gold futures have declined about 30 percent in the past day to between $260 and $290, according to CoinMarketCap.
Bitcoin Gold’s developers seek to decentralize the process of mining the cryptocurrency, according to its website.
“By changing Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash, all of the specialized SHA256 mining equipment will be obsolete for mining the Bitcoin Gold blockchain,” the website says. “Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for countless new people around the world to participate in the mining process with widely-available consumer hardware that is manufactured and distributed by reputable mainstream corporations.”
Hive Blockchain Technologies Inc., a startup that’s among the first public companies focused on cryptocurrency mining, is keeping an eye on the coin developments.
"We have been monitoring potential switches to GPU consensus mechanisms for Bitcoin closely -- ASICS are centralized to miners predominantly in China which makes the whole decentralization nature of bitcoin somewhat unfair," Olivier Francois Roussy Newton, co-founder and director of Hive Blockchain, said by e-mail. "I was personally in support of Bitcoin Resilience (BTR) which has now been delayed due to Segwit 2X being called off, I think projects like these will gain further recognition in the future."
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