Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Bitcoin Gold

This proposal has been implemented as a hard fork since block 49,1407 of the original Bitcoin blockchain. Being a hard fork, it resulted in a new blockchain, named Bitcoin Gold (BTG). The core idea behind this concept is to address the issue of mining centralization which has hurt the original Bitcoin idea of decentralized digital cash whereby more hash power has resulted in a power shift towards miners with more hashing power. BTG uses the Equihash algorithm as its mining algorithm instead of PoW; hence it is inherently ASIC resistant and uses GPUs for mining.

There are other proposals like Bitcoin Next Generation, Solidus, Spectre, and SegWit2x which will be discussed later in this book in Chapter 18, Scalability and Other ...