Bitcoin Gold - A More Decentralised Blockchain ?
Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, with the aim of making Bitcoin more decentralised, by allowing miners with cheaper computing devices to competitively mine it. Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is available as a CFD at some brokers. As a CFD, the trader does not own the cryptocurrency, does not need a wallet to store it and can go long or short.
How is Bitcoin Gold related to Bitcoin ?
Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of Bitcoin. Underlying a cryptocurrency is its ledger. Unlike a centralised payment processing system, this ledger is built on the internet, using miners who compete to process transaction blocks. As these blocks verified by nodes on the network and added together, they create a chain of processed blocks of transactions. Each chain is cryptographically secured, as are the contents of block. This secure ledger is called the blockchain.
A blockchain is a grouping of blocks of data. However it is possible to fork off from a blockchain to create another blockchain. This can be done for a number of reasons, typically to implement a major change to the way the blockchain is built. The impetus to do this can be to try and improve a perceived problem with the blockchain to be forked from. Bitcoin Gold is a fork which changes a number of rules by which Bitcoin operates.
What makes Bitcoin Gold different from Bitcoin ?
Bitcoin Gold aims to make Bitcoin decentralised again, by changing Bitcoin's proof of work (PoW) algorithm, allowing it to be run on GPUs, rather than specialised ASIC machines (Bitcoin Gold's PoW algorithm cannot be run on ASIC machines, because of the amount of memory it uses). GPUs are graphical processing units (which computer games are played on, for example).
ASIC stands for application specific integrated circuit. ASIC's are built for the job of mining a particular coin, while GPUs are more generalised less expensive off-the-shelf computing devices. ASICs tend to be used by larger scale mining pools, while GPUs are used by more small scale miners. ASICs tend to be faster, thus driving out GPUs, as the mining process works on a competitive basis.
So Bitcoin Gold, by using a PoW algorithm which cannot be performed on an ASIC, opens up many small scale miners to being competitive on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain. Less specialisation in effect makes for more decentralisation.