Second Bitcoin fork: Bitcoin Gold

On October 24, a new cryptocurrency called bitcoin gold (BTG) officially separated from the Bitcoin blockchain. In August 2017, Bitcoin underwent a similar fork that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash. The Bitcoin system involves solving complex math problems, translated into transactions, and miners are using high-powered computers to determine if the transaction gathered into “blocks” are possible.

The need for high-end machinery has meant that mining is controlled by a small group of people with powerful computers. Bitcoin Gold came as a way to change this dynamic. The idea is to allow Bitcoin gold to be mined by more people with less powerful machines, therefore decentralizing the network further and opening it up to a wider user base.
Everyone who owns Bitcoin will receive Bitcoin gold. This is being issued at the rate of 1 Bitcoin Gold to Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin Gold was issued, its price has plunged over 66%, trading at just over USD 161 per coin, according to Coinmarketcap data.

Bitcoin gold has faced some problems in the few hours it has been around. The website for the new cryptocurrency suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack, which is when a server is overloaded with requests. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency is still under development, and there has yet to be official word from the project on the cause of the outage.