Bitcoin Gold (Image: Bitcoin Investors UK)

The Bitcoin Gold Hard Fork Explained

Bitcoin Gold (BTG/Bgold) is an upcoming hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain that’s scheduled to occur on October 25th.

Bitcoin Gold (Image: Bitcoin Investors UK)
Bitcoin Gold (Image: Bitcoin Investors UK)

Bgold has nothing to do with the yellow metal, so it shouldn’t be confused with BitGold, the gold investments and payments firm. Bgold is equally unrelated to both the previous hard fork, Bitcoin Cash (BCH/Bcash), which occurred on August 1, and the upcoming SegWit2X (S2X/Bizcoin) hard fork, which is scheduled for mid-November.

Why Bitcoin Gold?

Bitcoin Gold will alter Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm from SHA-256, which is currently dominated mostly by Chinese ASIC miners, to the Equihash algorithm. Equihash is employed by the Ethereum, zCash (Classic), Zencash, and Hush cryptocurrencies. Equihash is mostly mined by graphics cards (GPUs).

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