Bitcoin Gold Launches Today

After weeks of preparation, Bitcoin Gold (Bgold; BTG) is finally launching today, November 12, 2017.

Bitcoin Gold is the second project to fork away from the Bitcoin blockchain to create a new coin this year; on August 1, Bitcoin Cash (Bcash) was the first. Where Bcash attempted to offer an on-chain scaling solution by increasing Bitcoin’s block size limit (while removing the Segregated Witness code), Bgold is an attempt to counter Bitcoin’s mining centralization.

The most important difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Gold is a new proof-of-work mining algorithm. Instead of SHA256, the new coin uses the memory-hard Equihash proof-of-work function that’s also used in the privacy-focused altcoin Zcash. This means that specialized ASIC hardware that has come to dominate Bitcoin’s mining ecosystem will not be able to mine Bgold.

Although Bgold is launching this weekend, the fork “officially” occurred on October 25. Anyone who held bitcoin (BTC) on that day (specifically, when Bitcoin block 491406 was mined) will have an equivalent amount of BTG attributed to their private keys. These private keys can be imported into a dedicated Bgold wallet, which, starting tomorrow, will allow users to spend the coins. (But note that this does not come without risks and tradeoffs: If you’re not sure what you’re doing, it’s best to ignore BTG until you do. For more information also see this article.)

Block 491407 on the Bgold blockchain will be the first block to deviate from the Bitcoin protocol. In other words, this will be the first block where Bgold splits off to become its own currency. However, somewhat controversially, the first 8000 blocks will be privately mined by the Bgold team. Only after these 8000 blocks will Bgold’s mining difficulty ramp up to normal levels, and will anyone be allowed to mine the coin. The resulting 100,000 BTG worth of block rewards will pay for project development and more. (For more details, see the Bitcoin Gold roadmap.)

Other changes implemented by Bitcoin Gold are mostly to ensure a smooth split away from Bitcoin. This includes a new difficulty re-adjustment algorithm named “DigiShield” that adjusts the mining difficulty each time a block is found — instead of once every two weeks. Bgold also includes strong replay protection, ensuring that no users spend BTC when they mean to spend BTG, and vice versa. Additionally, BGold implemented a new address scheme, preventing users from spending BTC to BTG addresses and vice versa.

Bitcoin Gold will be supported by a relatively large number of exchanges, including major players like Bitfinex, OKex and HitBTC. Several of these exchanges are effectively supporting BTC/BTG trading already through futures markets. Ignoring an initially inflated price, these futures have traded at around 0.02 BTC in recent weeks, with a notable surge to about 0.042 BTC over the past few days. If this holds up, 1 BTG would be worth almost $250, and Bgold would immediately become a top-5 altcoin on websites like coinmarketcap.com.

For more information on Bitcoin Gold, see Bitcoin Magazine’s earlier article on this project.

Author: Aaron van Wirdum

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
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Bitcoin price – Cryptocurrency plummets $1000 ahead of bitcoin gold split

Bitcoin price - Cryptocurrency plummets $1000 ahead of bitcoin gold split

Bitcoin price – Cryptocurrency plummets $1000 ahead of bitcoin gold split

BITCOIN prices took a blow today, falling below £5,328.46 ($7,000) just days before a planned software update will release bitcoin gold.

Bictoin prices fell by £761.21 ($1,000) in just over 48 hours after strong performance at the start of the week.

The crypto token opened today at £5,440.19 ($7,146.78), according to CoinDesk, before peaking at £5,579.71 ($7,330.06).

On Wednesday, the popular digital currency flared to an unprecedented price of more than £5,937.43 ($7,800) in the wake of the cancelled Segwit2x update.

The plummeting price comes on top of a hard fork that took place a few weeks ago, and will now come into effect with a new token known as bitcoin gold (BTG).

BTG aims to keep most properties of the bitcoin protocol, but will disallow the use of specialised chipsets in the mining process.

Bitcoin gold is now scheduled to arrive at 7pm GMT on Sunday November 12 – not November 1, as it was originally planned.

The token's backers said in a statement: "We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the bitcoin gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time."

In a similar split to bitcoin cash earlier in August, all current users of the cryptocurrency will be credited with a number of BTG tokens equal to their bitcoin stash.

bitcoin-price-news-bitcoin-gold-hard-fork-split-btc-value-1125459
Bitcoin price: The crypto token plummeted after a week of strong performance

In the few months that is has been alive, bitcoin cash has already managed to amount a market cap volume of £10,546,618,870.19 ($13,855,093,020).

But the creators of bitcoin gold have faced criticism, mostly for choosing to withhold one per cent of the currency's volume.

Unlike bitcoin, the new token was created in advance of being open-sourced to the public.

BTG's creators have argued that this move simply aims to pay the development team for their work.

Users will be able to redeem their coins after the cryptocurrency is launched.

Some have also criticised the need for a bitcoin derivative in market already over-saturated by crypto tokens.

Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, said in an statement: "These forks are very bad for bitcoin.

"Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins — since you can always fork it and double the supply."

There are currently more than 1,200 different tokens in existence according to CoinMarketCap. Most of them do not even reach a tenth of a dollar in price.

Author: SEBASTIAN KETTLEY
PUBLISHED: 18:03, Fri, Nov 10, 2017 | UPDATED: 18:13, Fri, Nov 10, 2017

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Bitcoin Gold Sets Sunday Date for Cryptocurrency Release

Bitcoin gold is set to go live this weekend.

In a new blog post, the developers behind the fork of the bitcoin blockchain said that they would release a formal software client for download at 7:00 PM UTC on Nov. 12. Originally set for a public launch on Nov. 1, the project is backed by LightningASIC, a seller of mining hardware based in Hong Kong, as well as a community of relatively unknown developers.

As reported by CoinDesk, the idea behind bitcoin gold is to keep most properties of the protocol, but restrict the use of specialized chips for mining, or the process by which new transactions are added to a blockchain (while also creating new tokens as a reward).

It's also the latest example of a "airdropped" cryptocurrency that will distribute new coins to anyone who owned bitcoin at the time of the split, or up until the date the ledger of transactions started to differ.

Yet in a move criticized by some observers, the team behind bitcoin gold has been mining blocks in insolation since the new network was formally created last month, with a certain amount of coins being set aside to support development.

In comments, the team behind the effort sought to send a signal of confidence to the market, perhaps owing to concerns circulating around the effort.

"We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the bitcoin gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time," the project's backers said in a statement.

In the days ahead, exchanges will no doubt be watching the launch. Soon after its August release, bitcoin cash, another cryptocurrency that forked the bitcoin network, amassed a nearly $4 billion market value.

Exchanges and traders will no doubt be watching to see if history repeats.

Author: Stan Higgins Nov 9, 2017 at 19:35 UTC

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Bitcoin’s Bogeyman Cometh – Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

Bitcoin's Bogeyman Cometh - Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

Bitcoin's Bogeyman Cometh – Why Segwit2x Is a 51% Attack

In bitcoin's Necronomicon of possible attacks and weaknesses, one reigns supreme – the 51% attack.

If there is a fear that has played on people's minds as the end-of-days scenario for bitcoin, it is this. Attackers who hold more than 50% of hashing power could stop transactions from confirming and even reverse some transactions. They could undermine the whole project.

Bitcoin's design and its system of economic incentives has been set up specifically to combat the destructive potential of a 51% attack. And it has worked. The 51% attack has remained a hypothetical bogeyman. Until now.

By all indication, a coordinated 51% attack will begin on, or around, Nov. 16. That's when a consortium of miners representing substantially more than 50% of the network's hashing power and an allied group of blockchain startups will seek to increase the block size.

This will require a hard fork, which while controversial, is a legitimate desire. In itself, this is not an attack.

Where it goes wrong

However, the consortium's effort has evolved beyond a simple fork. It is now being developed not simply as an effort to fork the chain, but to do so in such a way as to deliberately prevent the continued existence of the status quo chain.

Specifically, the developers involved have declined to introduce replay protection.

The 2x fork will create a situation where transactions performed on one fork, can be "replayed" on the second fork. In effect, users will have funds on both blockchains, but any transaction they perform on one blockchain could lead to a loss of funds on the other blockchain.

Replay protection is a fairly easy-to-implement method to protect users from this risk. Network attacks are those actions taken with the intention of disrupting the protocol’s normal functioning. The 2x change, bereft of replay protection, causes massive disruption. This is by design.

Without replay protection in place, a minority chain becomes less likely to survive.

Question of motives

The preferred outcome for the consortium is that the status quo chain ceases to exist, that its transactions fail to confirm.

This is the literal definition of a 51% attack. If it sounds a bit bizarre to call the consortium's effort an attack, that's because it is. The consortium comprises many real supporters of bitcoin, acting in what they believe is good faith. They don't mean to be attacking bitcoin.

However, without replay protection their efforts are like an autoimmune disease, having become overzealous and perverted.

So, bitcoin is finally coming to come face-to-face with the mother of all attacks. This is a watershed moment. The very worst outcomes are bad indeed.

Transactions could grind to a halt, faith in the system could be lost, bitcoin and by extension, the entire blockchain world could prove to be far more vulnerable to attack than we hoped.

We shall overcome

However, there is also another possible, even more likely, outcome.

Bitcoin could prove resilient to the consortium's attack and emerge battered but unbroken. In so doing, bitcoin will have proven itself resilient to even its greatest foe.

It is hard to overstate how important this will be to bitcoin's perceived reliability. Bitcoin has always been haunted by the risk that its rules might come to be dictated by special interest groups or hostile, state-sponsored parties.

This risk is never going completely away, but instead of the risk being a hypothetical bogeyman, it will become a much more prosaic thing: a successfully managed risk.

The 51% attack is bitcoin's boss level. I don’t think it's an exaggeration to say that we are now at the end of the beginning. If we successfully overcome this coming challenge, bitcoin will no longer be just an experiment, it will be a fact.

But don't expect less drama — we are now entering bitcoin's adolescence.

HODL on tight, things will get hairy.

Author: Edan Yago Nov 8, 2017 at 02:30 UTC

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Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork Draws Mixed Reactions

The Bitcoin Gold hard fork that caused a minor, temporary dip in bitcoin’s price a couple weeks ago has drawn both “boos” and “bravos” from the cryptocurrency community. Most observers voiced no problem with hard forks as a tool for competition and experimentation, but some see forks as compromising the perception of bitcoin’s limited supply, which they view as critical to its underlying value.

After debuting near $500 on Oct. 24, Bitcoin Gold (BTG), an altcoin that — like Bitcoin Cash — has a shared blockchain history with bitcoin, saw its price fall to $136 in two days — even amid buying pressure from margin traders who wanted to purchase it to pay back lenders. The price has stabilized since that time, standing at $140.63 on Nov. 5, according to coinmarketcap.com.

Many in the bitcoin community were quick to criticize Bitcoin Gold because of what they saw as its impractical idea to decentralize bitcoin mining, and also due to its plans to premine the cryptocurrency. Many investors, traders, developers and users do not welcome the concept of premining a cryptocurrency before its launch because it leads to a centralization of funds before the launch.

Nevertheless, several exchanges — including Bitfinex and HitBTC — have credited their users with BTG balances and added trading pairs, although they cannot enable deposits or withdrawals until after the mainnet is stable.

Forks Serve A Purpose

“There is no such thing as a “bad fork,” Bob Summerwill, chief blockchain developer at Sweetbridge, a blockchain alliance, said in a prepared statement. “You don’t have to cheer one team or the other. Experimentation and competition are good. Let the market decide, and participate where you see value.”

Summerwill said the ETH/ETC split indicated that minority chains are viable.

“The ETH/ETC split was very healthy for the community,” Summerwill said. “The Ethereum community moved on to mainstream adoption, and the Ethereum Classic community took control of its own destiny and took the code the way they wanted as well. I think that the chain splits will be healthy for the bitcoin community for the same reason.”

Splits happen periodically in all open-source communities, Summerwill said. Sometimes there are genuine differences of opinion, and network effects are not enough to keep everybody together, so a group secedes.

“This is how humans work,” he said. “It is a beautiful thing.”

Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, a privacy coin for borderless, decentralized communications and transactions, takes a similar view.

“Open-source ecosystems are designed to evolve, whether that’s through in-project improvements or forks in which the entire code base goes in an incompatible direction,” Viglione said. “Evolution is a messy process, so it doesn’t always turn out well, but sometimes that’s the only way to have big breakthroughs.

Viglione said it is not clear that swapping SHA-256 for Equihash mining is sufficiently value-added to warrant a new coin, especially since Zcash already did it last year, but it’s ultimately up to the stakeholders.

Can Forks Hurt Bitcoin?

Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, a technology company creating smart products secured through blockchain technology, holds a different view.

“These forks are very bad for bitcoin,” Lederer said. “Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins – since you can always fork it and double the supply.”

Lederer is troubled by the fact that the spinoffs spring from a minor debate on how to handle the block size limit.

“Instead of coming to agreement, the community, developers and code are fracturing into different groups,” he said. “We’re learning that while a blockchain gives you consensus on a distributed ledger, it does not give you consensus on the code base, that is what code to run. This does not bode well for bitcoin’s future, where it will face new and bigger challenges requiring further upgrades to the code base.”

Forks Will Continue

Expect more such forks in the future, says Taulant Ramabaja, chief technology officer at ULedger, a blockchain based solution for data assurance, storage and other services. He said the bitcoin ecosystem has a triangle of three veto powers: 1) the miners, 2) the exchanges and 3) the wallets (without key ownership).

“For any fork to become dominant in the future, a sufficiently large part of all three need to jump ship,” Ramabaja said. “This is highly unlikely, and therefore bitcoin favors the status quo.”

However, once Bitcoin Lightning based exchanges and wallets come online, this picture can change as the roles of exchanges and wallets will change, Ramabaja said.

Forks Have Shortcomings

Luis Cuende, co-founder and project lead at Aragon, a decentralized platform for building and managing organizations and companies, supports the goal of decentralizing bitcoin as much as possible, but he has issues with Bitcoin Gold since it doesn’t have replay protection, which makes it unsafe for bitcoin users.

Abhishek Pitti, founder and CEO of Nucleus, a provider of sensor technology that uniquely identifies users and senses pressure, motion and acceleration, believes the upcoming SegWit2x hard fork presents a serious risk to the bitcoin ecosystem due to its lack of backward compatibility or replay protection, with major developers and exchanges refusing to support it.

“On the flip side, I understand the argument presented in the form of ‘decentralization of bitcoin mining’ to people with GPUs, rather than the ASIC mining scene, which has become very centralized,” Pitti said. “Proponents of this idea believe that Bitcoin Gold can help bring mining back into the power of the common users.”

Author: Lester Coleman on 06/11/2017

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
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Bitcoin Price Storms to $5,955 as Bitcoin Gold Fizzles

The crypto markets experienced a moderate recovery on Thursday, as the bitcoin price began to recover from the dip that it entered following the Bitcoin Gold hard fork. Many altcoins achieved slight price bumps as well, enabling the total cryptocurrency market cap to rise above the $172 billion mark.

Chart from CoinMarketCap

Early in the day, it appeared that the markets were heading south, continuing their movement from the previous day. However, they began to tick up on Wednesday afternoon, and the crypto market cap currently sits at $172.5 billion, which represents a 24-hour increase of $5.1 billion.

Chart from CoinMarketCap

Bitcoin Price Recovers Near $6,000

The recovery was fueled by a 7.5% bitcoin price rise. After beginning the day in decline, the bitcoin price consolidated support at the $5,485 mark and reversed its trajectory leading into Thursday morning. At present, the bitcoin price is trading at $5,955, which translates into a $99.1 billion market cap.

Bitcoin Price Chart from CoinMarketCap

It is not immediately clear what is fueling this march back toward $6,000, but many analysts believe it is an early phase of bitcoin’s eventual transformation into a mainstream asset. Standpoint Research’s Ronnie Moas, for instance, recently predicted that the bitcoin price will reach $50,000 over the course of the next decade.

Ethereum Price Stuck Below $300

The ethereum price made a minor gain on Thursday, advancing about seven-tenths of one percent to increase to a present value of $299. Nevertheless, it was unable to pierce the $300 mark or break out of that threshold’s gravitational pull. Ethereum maintains a market cap of about $28.5 billion.

Ethereum Price Chart from CoinMarketCap

‘Cash’ Rises as ‘Gold’ Fizzles

The bitcoin cash price outperformed the majority of top-tier cryptocurrencies on Thursday, rising as high as $347, although it has since tapered to $340. This is likely due to the dismal performance of Bitcoin Gold — another altcoin created from a Bitcoin fork — during its first few days on the exchanges.

Bitcoin Cash Price Chart from CoinMarketCap

Unlike Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold has virtually no community and institutional support, and that has been reflected in its declining price. After debuting near $500, the bitcoin gold price has plunged to $131 — even amid buy pressure from margin traders who needed to purchase it to pay back lenders — and this may worsen when the network officially launches and traders are able to begin making deposits on exchanges.

Bitcoin Gold Price Chart from CoinMarketCap

This bodes well for bitcoin cash, because industry observers theorize that subsequent forks of bitcoin will have diminishing returns and that the forked coins may cannibalize one another. Though it is still early, it appears that bitcoin cash will emerge the victor in this contest with bitcoin gold.

Altcoins Post Minor Gains

Altcoins — led by bitcoin cash — generally made gains on Thursday, although a few top 10 cryptocurrencies did not participate in the advance.

Chart from CoinMarketCap

The ripple price rose about one-half of one percent, but this was not enough to push XRP’s market cap back across the $8 billion threshold. The litecoin price increased 3%, while dash and NEM sat the rally out. Bitconnect led top 10 cryptocurrencies, posting a 12% increase that raised its price to $219, but the NEO price dropped below the $30 mark after a 4% pullback. Tenth-ranked monero achieved a minor gain, but its price continues to trade below $90.

Author Josiah Wilmoth on 26/10/2017

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First Cash, Now Gold? Another Bitcoin Hard Fork Is on the Way

first cash now gold

First Cash, Now Gold? Another Bitcoin Hard Fork Is on the Way

Bitcoin, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold?

There could be as many as four cryptocurrencies bearing the bitcoin name if a small group of miners and developers carry out a planned fork of the blockchain this month.

Styled as a rebellion of sorts, bitcoin gold aims to follow a similar launch plan as bitcoin cash – the blockchain that split from bitcoin this summer by way of a "hard fork." The idea of the project is to release an improved protocol, one that will challenge bitcoin cash in particular, and details are now starting to come come into focus.

Led by Jack Liao, CEO of Hong Kong mining firm LightningASIC, bitcoin gold is slated to launch on October 25, with its cryptocurrency being opened to exchanges on November 1.

Still, while whispers of the event are just beginning to spread, the importance of the project appears up for debate. Given that bitcoin cash produced an ultimately smaller bitcoin network, not to mention a cryptocurrency that's worth about 12 percent as much as bitcoin at press time, most seem to view the plan as another distraction in an already divided community.

For one, bitcoin gold looks like it could be even smaller that bitcoin cash, at least in that not as many miners seem to support it.

In remarks, BTC.Top founder Jiang Zhuoer and ViaBTC CEO Haipo Yang – two early champions of bitcoin cash – went so far as to downplay bitcoin gold as insignificant.

'Decentralized again'

But while those in the know might be skeptical of bitcoin gold, it does have a goal that many in the community may find attractive: creating a truly decentralized bitcoin.

Most notably, the developers behind the network hope to open up mining to more participants by replacing bitcoin's mining algorithm with one that will enable it to be mined with graphics cards. The idea is to make big miners – sometimes controversial figures on the network – less relevant.

"Bitcoin gold will implement a proof-of-work change from bitcoin's SHA256 to Equihash, a memory-hard algorithm that is ASIC-resistant and optimized for GPU mining," explained pseudonymous bitcoin gold developer "The Sorrow."

That the plan is being hatched in China, long the hotbed of bitcoin mining, only adds another layer to the story. Liao, whose mining hardware largely focuses on the litecoin network, is seen as one of the few voices domestically that can challenge the established order.

Yet, Liao was quick to name one mining firm in particular, Bitmain, as the reason that more bitcoin users should support the idea. A mining company that has been at the center of bitcoin drama over the last year, critics have long argued that the firm has too much of an influence over the network.

Still, creating a network that grows so popular as to remove miners is easier said than done, and some are skeptical that this would lead to the end goal that bitcoin gold advocates desire.

"GPU mining can't prevent centralization. GPU [markets] are controlled by Nvidia and AMD," Zhao Dong, a cryptocurrency trader and investor, argued in response to the plan.

Liao, however, argued the accessibility of the companies' products means the distribution of hashing power might evolve differently.

Bitcoin gold's unknowns

Again, though, even project leaders admit many of the details around the hard fork are fuzzy.

Bitcoin gold's pseudonymous lead developer "h4x" said that the project is "still evolving" and details such as exact block height of the hard fork are still up for discussion.

According to the original website text, bitcoin gold was even planning an initial coin offering (ICO) by which 1 percent of the bitcoin gold coins would go to the developer team, but these details have since been removed.

One thing is clear though about the funding: because of the nature of the split, every bitcoin user at the time will have an equal amount of bitcoin gold associated with their private key.

"It is a minimalist fork of the Bitcoin Core codebase in the spirit of litecoin – only a few conservative modifications," said h4x.

H4x went on to describe bitcoin gold in more abstract biological terms, arguing that it tests how well hard forks work and if they benefit the ecosystem.

He said:

"Organisms derive benefits from creating offspring. With bitcoin gold we are conducting an experiment to see if that principle holds true in the world of blockchains."

And this sentiment is largely in line with developers who have predicted that more bitcoin forks similar to bitcoin cash will come forth in the future.

After bitcoin cash forked earlier this summer, for example, Lightning Network developer Tadge Dryja argued that more forks would spring up, but for another reason: money.

With bitcoin gold in the works and another hard fork slated for November, it seems that prediction is slowly becoming reality.

Sep 27, 2017 at 08:00 UTC by Alyssa Hertig

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
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