Bitcoin Gold
Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is a hard fork of the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Founded by Jack Liao, it is an open-source, decentralized digital currency without a central bank or intermediary that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer Bitcoin Gold network. [1][2]
Overview
BTG is a crypto with Bitcoin fundamentals, mined on common GPUs instead of specialty application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). GPU mining rewards go to individuals worldwide, instead of mostly to ASIC warehouse owners, recreating network effects that Bitcoin used to have. [1]
Bitcoin Gold was hard forked from the Bitcoin blockchain on October 24, 2017, at block height 491407. The aim was to create an ASIC-resistant version of Bitcoin to decentralize the network, addressing the concentration of mining power. The concept behind Bitcoin Gold was "one CPU one vote," reflecting Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision where every node could mine coins. [1][5]
Tokenomics
Bitcoin Gold has a total supply of 21,000,000 BTG tokens. Out of the total amount of BTG tokens, 30% went towards the development of the blockchain and the project. Another 15% was reserved for ecosystem support and development, and another 15% was distributed amongst the BTG community. [3]
About 20% of the total BTG token supply was reserved for yearly expenses. Close to 7% of BTG tokens were set aside for bounties and app collaboration, while another 5% went towards rewards for the founding team. The remaining 8% of tokens went towards covering pre-fork costs and community development. [3][4]
Network Attacks
Soon after the launch, the Bitcoin Gold website experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and received criticism from Coinbase and Bittrex for being hastily put together, as well as including a developer pre-mine. [6]
In May 2018, Bitcoin Gold experienced a 51% hashing attack by an unknown actor, allowing manipulation of the blockchain ledger and double-spending of digital coins. During this attack, approximately 388,000 BTG (worth around US$18 million) was stolen from several cryptocurrency exchanges. The BTG team said the hack was a combination of a 51% attack and a double-spend attack. Subsequently, Bitcoin Gold was delisted from Bittrex after the team declined to contribute to damages. [7]
