Bitcoin Gold – a new coin for GPU mining
There were rumors about a new cryptocurrency based on bitcoin blockchain — traders and interested users were discussing it for months and years. Finally, in November, 2017 it happened. Bitcoin Gold became a parallel cryptocurrency, so please never confuse these two ones — BTC and BTG.
Why people need Bitcoin Gold?
As you may probably know Bitcoin mining started with CPU mining, but pretty soon people began using their graphic cards for that. Bitcoin Gold is a currency which is 100% "mineable" with GPU. Mining of Bitcoin Gold is simplified for the users with powerful graphic cards.
Now if you are an inveterate miner who has access to cheap electricity and highly-effective hardware — make the most of it! Bitcoin Gold is in the beginning of its way and you can mine much more of it than one or two years later!
BTG background
Rumors transformed into real plans in July, 2017 when Jack Lao — the founder of Lighting ASIC and the owner of huge mining farms in Hong Kong — announced launching of a new cryptocurrency operating on Bitcoin blockchain.
According to some specialists Bitcoin Gold works not with an original algorithm, but with Equihash — similar to Zcash. It means that miners now can determine the block size themselves, while the default block size is 1 mb. This helps in planning the mining process and in gaining more benefits that with traditional mining.
Advantages of Bitcoin Gold
The first advantage is not related with BTG directly, it is about the investors of the project. There are wealthy people behind Bitcoin Gold who made significant investments in it. It is the best proof of serious intentions of the founders.
We all see new coins appearing and disappearing every day. Many of them exist for few months only, sometimes even less, and in this case we are totally sure that Bitcoin Gold is something absolutely different.
Right now BTG is in the initial stage and it is relatively easy to mine. An opportunity to mine with GPUs makes Bitcoin Gold available for much bigger number of people than ASIC mining. Due to this individuals will be able to compete with large mining farms, and the value of BTG will be growing quickly.
Jack Lao is sure that launching of Bitcoin Gold is a very annoying thing for such corporations like Bitmain Technologies which produce ASIC chips for mining and actually control the market of traditional market.
Finally, owners of traditional Bitcoin received a nice present — free Bitcoin Gold coins to their wallets right after BTG launching. It was enough to install a BTG wallet to get as many BTG coins as you have BTC in your Bitcoin wallet.
Disadvantages of Bitcoin Gold
From the other hand, there are rather many people who think that Bitcoin Gold is no good. The main reason is that it will become an unnecessary alternative for Bitcoin and create confusion among traders.
It is now very hard to predict the behavior of Bitcoin — we do not know how Bitcoin Gold will influence the exchange rates yet. And we do not know if Bitcoin Gold will have stable and positive dynamics all the time.
The exchange rate of Bitcoin Gold fluctuates a lot since the day of launching — it is located somewhere between $190 and $350.
What's more, BTG value reduced by nearly 2 times within first few days. This was caused with a great number of technical issues miners and traders faced. Actually, it made us think that the system was just not tested properly — it was unable to bear such a big load.
The last disadvantage of Bitcoin Gold we would like to mention is a very small amount of information about this new cryptocurrency. We know some basic things like focus of GPU mining and so on, but we do not know enough about the operation principles of Bitcoin Gold.
We just hope that BTG developers will solve the most important technical problems soon — we mean troubles with electronic wallets, software for mining and issues with mining pools.
Prospects of Bitcoin Gold
Less than 3 months have passed since the day of BTG launch. As we have mentioned above its exchange rate is too volatile yet, and the value of Bitcoin Gold is totally unpredictable. Right now there is much hype around Bitcoin Gold — some traders say that BTG is the logical continuation and evolution of BTC while the others are sure that the project of crypto gold will fail very soon.
Such a contradictory situation is favorable for speculants and simply for the traders preferring short-term investments. People with good trading intuition have already earned good money with BTG.
We expect that this crazy popularity of Bitcoin Gold will last for few more months, and then its value will probably start gradually reducing. At least this is what we see with other cryptocurrencies. By summer 2018 we will have more information on how reliable the new system is and how convenient it is for users.
Conclusion
There was a very good review about Bitcoin Gold where this cryptocurrency was called "the coin for lonely people". At this early stage we can confirm this — individual miners can benefit from Bitcoin Gold a lot. It is possible to mine the coins having a GPU of the last generation, but the price of the coin is not that high yet. We hardly suggest miners firstly calculate costs for their country — there are places when electricity is very expensive and any kind of mining is simply not profitable.
It would not be smart to rely on Bitcoin Gold too much and to invest one's main finances into it, but BTG can be a good tool for short-term operations. In general everything looks good, but we do not yet how the software of Bitcoin Gold will function in future.
It would be a good idea to wait a bit longer and see how it goes, because technically Bitcoin Gold is an efficient decentralized system which can help individual miners compete with corporations and big mining pools.
So keep your eye on Bitcoin Gold and don't miss the right time to buy or sell it!
