Fork the Fork: Bitcoin Gold is Set to Make a Hard Fork

Bitcoin Gold, already a fork of Bitcoin, has announced an upcoming hard fork of its network. With this upgrade, the development team is aiming at two aspects that are making the network vulnerable – the threat of increasing ASIC miner flooding the network and to prevent future 51 percent attacks.

In the official announcement released on 4th June, the team noted: “We’re doing this for two reasons: we need to address the threat of ASIC miners coming into the Equihash mining space, and we need to take steps to improve the security of our blockchain in light of the recent 51% / Double Spend attacks.”

Help us to make Finance Magnates better!

Bitcoin Cash was created in October 2017 by forking Bitcoin’s blockchain. To keep the existing ASIC miners of Bitcoin at a distance, the new coin used Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm, an alteration to Bitcoin’s hash algorithm. Though for the time being, it kept the ASIC miners away, Bitmain’s introduction of a new mining device – Antminer Z9 – opened the gates of Bitcoin Gold to the ASIC miners.

In the new upgrade, the team is changing the existing Equihash algorithm with new Equihash-BTG. This will increase the memory required for the ASIC miners for the mining activity and thus will make their mining business unprofitable.

Vulnerable network

Another major target Bitcoin Gold developers are trying to hit is the vulnerability of the network to 51 percent attacks. The coin shares its algorithm with many cryptocurrencies and thus hash rate generated from a collective pool can easily exploit the network.

Moreover, Bitcoin Gold’s network was already compromised using 51 percent attack last month which resulted in the theft of $18 million worth of BTG tokens.

The team is claiming that the introduction of the new algorithm will drastically reduce the required hash power which will make it very difficult to take similar control over the network.

According to the announcement, the development team has already started the process, however, the exact date of the migration is not revealed yet as it will take the involvement of all the stakeholders including wallets, exchanges, and mining pools.