Bitcoin Gold
fork of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin from October 2017
Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is a cryptocurrency which was created as a hard fork of bitcoin.
The stated purpose of the hard fork is to make mining on commonly available graphics cards economically viable. The cryptocurrency has been hit by two 51% hashing attacks, once in 2018 and once in 2020.
History
Bitcoin Gold hard forked from the bitcoin blockchain on October 24, 2017. The stated purpose of the hard fork was to change the proof of work algorithm so that ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) which are used to mine bitcoin cannot be used to mine the Bitcoin Gold blockchain in the hopes that enabling mining on commonly available graphics cards would allow mining from a home PC.
According to Mashable the launch was criticized for being hastily put together and for including a developer pre-mine. Shortly after launch, the project's website came under a distributed denial of service attack.
In May 2018, Bitcoin Gold was hit by a 51% hashing attack by an unknown actor. This type of attack makes it possible to manipulate the blockchain ledger on which transactions are recorded, and to spend the same digital coins more than once. During the attack, 388,000 BTG (worth approximately US$18 million) was stolen from several cryptocurrency exchanges. Bitcoin Gold was later delisted from Bittrex, after the team refused to help pay some damages.
The public source identifies “Bitcoin Gold” as fork of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin from October 2017. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bitcoin, Gold and fork.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bitcoin Gold” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.