Gold or cheap fake: what happened to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin Gold (BTG)?

However, some of the forks were able to take their place in the sun and acquire their community of supporters, thanks to which they are still developing today. This article will discuss one of these forks, Bitcoin Gold.

How did Bitcoin Gold appear and develop?

One of the main tasks of forks is to add something new to the original protocol or, on the contrary, to preserve the original. Some changes cannot be achieved without hardfork — braining the network. Sometimes, it also happens because of conflicts within the team.

The reason for Bitcoin Gold was the growing centralization of Bitcoin after ASIC miners entered the game. At least, that's what the team claimed. The developers of the hardfork changed the original bitcoin mining algorithm so that it was impossible to mine the cryptocurrency using ASIC devices, and could only be done through graphics processing unit (GPU) calculations. As a result, Bitcoin Gold developers modified the Equihash algorithm used in the Zcash network and created their own Equihash-BTG based on it.

According to the team, this should contribute to the high decentralization of the network, as the entry threshold for GPU mining is much lower compared to ASIC miners, with prices starting at several thousand dollars.

The Bitcoin Gold hardfork appeared on October 24, 2017 following Bitcoin Cash.

What's wrong with Bitcoin Gold?

Coinbase and Bittrex criticized Bitcoin Gold for developers not finalizing the network and releasing the hardfork too early. The companies also noted that the developers were involved in the pre-mining of the BTG cryptocurrency.

Almost from the very beginning, Bitcoin Gold was plagued by problems that could indicate weak development:

• First, the Bitcoin Gold website suffered a successful DDoS attack sometime after launch.
• Second, the network itself was attacked twice by 51%. The first incident occurred in May 2018: a successful attack stole 388,000 BTG worth about $18 million at the exchange rate from cryptocurrency exchanges. The Bitcoin Gold team refused to pay part of the losses at Bitfinex's request, after which the BTG cryptocurrency was removed from this exchange. The 51% attack was repeated in January 2020, but six months later, the developers released an emergency update, as a result of which the negative consequences of the hack were avoided.

What to expect from Bitcoin Gold?

Bitcoin Gold ranks 151st in the CoinMarketCap ranking and is significantly inferior in capitalization to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV: BTG has a capitalization of only $292 million. It should be noted that many of the discussed crypto projects have larger capitalization even at the time of listing. For example, the cryptocurrency TIA, released on October 31, immediately after the launch of trading capitalization, reached $310 million.

BTG reached its all-time high of $539 in December 2017, just two months after its launch. This was facilitated by the mass excitement around cryptocurrencies, which caused many altcoins to grow rapidly in value despite the lack of prospects for some of them.

In 2021, during the next bullrun, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin Gold failed to reach ATH and only grew to $131, after which it began to fall, like all other cryptocurrencies except for stablecoins. Since the beginning of 2023, the BTG exchange rate has grown almost one and a half times.

Project analysis

Bitcoin Gold is an almost inactive project: the team stopped hosting Twitter in 2018. The project has a small community in the messenger Telegram, with just over 2,000 participants. The information on the website is not updated either, and the BTG cryptocurrency is not traded on many major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase or Bitfinex.

Over the past two years, only two minor updates have been released on the project's Git Hub, meaning there has been virtually no developer activity or development of the project.

The only possible growth drivers at the moment remain the support of the community and investors during the next bullrun, which could again cause a stir even for zombie coins and tokens.

Summary

Bitcoin Gold has no future. Despite the developers' claims, all indications are that the team was pursuing a speculative interest: the BTG coin was given away for free to all Bitcoin holders at a 1-to-1 ratio. Bitcoin Gold came out just at the beginning of the bullrun, when almost any cryptocurrency was growing, and there were many ways to capitalize on it, including hardforks.

Also, the team has not implemented many of the roadmap items presented back in 2019 and has not released news about the project since May 2021 — just amid the end of the last bullrun, and this once again points to the likely purely speculative interest of the creators, as well as the fact that the hardfork was launched virtually in "raw" form.

At the start, the project had every chance to take leading positions: in December 2017, Bitcoin Gold ranked 11th in capitalization among all cryptocurrencies, surpassing EOS, Stellar, Ethereum Classic and even Tron. However, the team abandoned the project and perhaps did not even intend to develop it.