The blockchain that Bitcoin is built upon is facing a second hard fork that will bring about a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold.
Bitcoin’s blockchain was recently hit by a hard fork, and the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash was suddenly created. While this fork seemed to come out of the blue, the imminent one is driven by an agenda.
Orchestrating this next fork is a small team led by Jack Liao, CEO of LightningAsic, and bitcoin mining sceptic.
Bitcoin Gold is planned to make the mining process more widely available across the globe, requiring far less formidable hardware. By relinquishing Bitcoin dominance from large organisations, Bitcoin Gold is set to establish itself as truly decentralised, the core characteristic of a digital currency.
Comparable to the result of the fork that brought Bitcoin Cash into being, the imminent fork will create Bitcoin Gold (BTG) at a rate of one Bitcoin, to one unit of BTG. The project website has indicated that 20 exchanges and wallets will be working with the new digital currency upon its launch.
The new currency was first proposed by Liao in the summer of 2017, and unsurprisingly, the idea has not received entirely supportive responses. According to Coindesk, the CEO of Satoshi Labs, Marek Palatinus is not confident that the initiative will decentralise mining.
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Bitcoin Cash was created by a fork that was initiated by a small group of Chinese Bitcoin miners, following a disagreement with the bitcoin developers. This disagreement centred on whether data should me moved outside of the block, or whether the size of blocks should be increased.
While bitcoin owners benefitted from the arrival of Bitcoin Cash, concerns were raised regarding the volatility of blockchain based services.
