Bitcoin Gold Finally Launches, After a Rocky Blockchain Start

Bitcoin Gold, the latest fork in the bitcoin blockchain has gone live. Developers of the breakaway published software for the cryptocurrency releasing the necessary code on GitHub as well. The aim of this move is to create the largest decentralized community in the crypto world. The new token was developed with the intention of being open-sourced.

“A massive attack was made in an apparent effort to disrupt the mainnet launch, but the Bitcoin Gold team managed to get the network up and running… albeit a little later than planned,” said the developers on their website.

Public mining for the cryptocurrency has begun, prompting the arrival of several mining pools along with the launch. Like with any new endeavor, it came with complications.

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According to CoinDesk “some users had problems connecting their nodes to other computers on the network. Others allege they were receiving spam messages containing links to fake (and potentially malevolent) software clients.”

In anticipation of the launch trading interest increased significantly, several exchanges even launched futures associated with bitcoin gold. Currently, Bitcoin Gold futures or BTG is trading between roughly $260 and $290 according to CoinMarketCap. A drop of 30 percent in the last 24 hours.

The token's backers said in a statement: "We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the bitcoin gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time.”

Despite the reception, creators of bitcoin gold have been facing a fair amount of criticism due to their withholding of one percent of the currency’s volume.

"These forks are very bad for bitcoin."- Sol Lederer, Loomia

Some in the crypto world see this move as negative since the market is already saturated enough.

Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, said in a statement to The Daily Express: 

"Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins — since you can always fork it and double the supply.”

Bitcoin Cash

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s other offset; bitcoin cash has accumulated a market cap volume of £10,546,618,870.19 ($13,855,093,020).

It was temporarily the second-largest virtual currency by market value on Sunday, briefly surpassing ethereal when it hit a record high of more than $US2,600 a coin. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, even congratulated backers of bitcoin cash on Twitter.

Congrats on this. Seriously. @rogerkver @JihanWu @deadalnix pic.twitter.com/UXYdEcRn4y

— Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) November 12, 2017

Another cryptocurrency is also gathering heat amongst the bitcoin coverage. Dash coin, the world’s fifth largest cryptocurrency doubled to an all-time high, trading at over $US500.