Bitcoin Gold (BTG) was one of the first major Bitcoin forks, as BTG split from the Bitcoin blockchain while maintaining many of the technical principles of the original Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin Gold is the original open source blockchain-based digital currency whose purpose and project is to democratize the mining process by making it accessible to ordinary users, by removing the need for specialized mining equipment, meaning making the mining process for everyone.

Despite the strong start of the Bitcoin Gold BTG project, this did not last long, as problems continued and surrounded the project, which led to a significant decrease in the value of the currency and in the confidence of investors in the currency.

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Below we get to know the story of Bitcoin Gold BTG and the reason for its decline in value.

What is Bitcoin Gold?

The Bitcoin Gold project aims to bring about and democratize the process of distributing BTG coins.

Bitcoin Gold has switched from its own SHA256 mining algorithm to the Equihash algorithm, allowing users to mine BTG using graphics processing units (GPUs).

The Bitcoin Gold development team hopes that they will prevent the centralization of mining, a problem that has plagued Bitcoin and many other Proof of Work (mining) cryptocurrencies.

The Bitcoin Gold developers also performed something known as “pre-mining” which allowed the project team to mine a total of 100,000 BTG before making the mining process publicly available.

Bitcoin Gold development is managed by the Bitcoin Gold Foundation, although the project’s code is open source.

What happened to the Bitcoin Gold project?

Although the Bitcoin Gold project was successfully launched, reaching a market capitalization of over $8 billion and BTG briefly held the 8th largest cryptocurrency position less than two months after its launch, the coin’s status has since been in a steady decline.

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For example, a group of popular trading platforms refused to list the currency and supported the split.

Among these platforms, we find Bittrex (the third most traded platform at the time) and Coinbase.

Bittrex later incorporated the cryptocurrency once the network was stable, but eventually the coin was delisted again after it suffered a 51% attack in May 2018, and the hacker stole about 388,000 BTG.

This 51% attack forced the Bitcoin Gold development team to implement an update to their mining algorithm in June 2018, switching from “Equihash” to a modified version of “Equihash” called “Equihash-BTG.”

Despite the team’s quick action and updates, the damage is already done.

BTG reached an all-time high of $539 in October 2017, after which the coin entered a near-permanent downtrend, dropping to $260 at the end of 2017, then to $12 at the end of 2018, and $5.41 at the end of 2019 .

Overall, Bitcoin Gold lost more than 98% of its value in just two years.

The current status of the Bitcoin Gold project:

In January 2020, a report emerged that one entity controlling at least half of the circulating supply of BTG could be said to have caused the coin to surge from $5.33 to a peak of $19.41 in just a matter of days, before the market crashed again.

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In the same month, the Bitcoin Gold network was again hit by another 51% attack, in which 29 blocks were reorganized and more than $70,000 of BTG was stolen through double-spending attacks.

“Bitcoin Gold” is exposed to a 51% attack, and the value of the currency “BTG” increases by 19%

Since then the currency has been experiencing more of an outright downtrend and its daily trading volume on trading platforms has seen a 75% crash since the beginning of the year.

It also witnessed a stagnation in its development and development activity in 2020.

In the last year, 21 new commits and 985 new lines of code were made, while in the past three months it was zero development.

The project management also announced a potential solution to the 51% attack problems with the concept of “Soft fork” known as the Cross Block Authentication Protocol, which may use secret metal to authenticate the blocks, preventing their forgery.

The Bitcoin Gold network now has only 97 nodes that can be accessed, half of which are located in Germany, the United States and France.

This is down 10% since July 2020 and 60% since March 2018, indicating a clear long-term downtrend.

Despite the dwindling network of nodes, the BTG developer team was able to thwart a 51% potential attack in July 2020 by circulating a checkpoint at block 640,650 to the nodes, preventing the attacker from gaining control of the blockchain.

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