Bitcoin Gold

What Is Bitcoin Gold?
Bitcoin Gold was a hard fork of the original open-source cryptocurrency which took place on Oct. 24, 2017.1 While hard forks take place for a number of reasons—including to scale as a cryptocurrency customer base grows, or because of developer conflict and differences of goals—Bitcoin Gold's stated purpose has been to "make bitcoin decentralized again." Bitcoin Gold was one of the largest and most discussed bitcoin forks.

On the surface, the idea of "making bitcoin decentralized again" may seem counterintuitive. Like all other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized already; it is not linked with any central bank, a particular country, or government bodyOne of the major issues with bitcoin which prompted the development of Bitcoin Gold, however, was not related to the question of central issuance at all. Rather, it had to do with the mining process. Bitcoin Gold developers believed that by adopting a new algorithm for the mining process (in this case, a so-called proof-of-work algorithm called Equihash-BTG), the new branch of the world's most popular cryptocurrency by market cap would not disproportionally favor major mining operations..