Recently, Bitcoin Gold became the latest “fork” of the original Bitcoin digital currency, joining Bitcoin Cash which was the first major hard fork back in August. However, Bitcoin Gold’s emergence has been far less controversial or even influential, but it has been rocky.

The aim of Bitcoin Gold is to be a currency that hands power back to the ordinary miner and enable anyone with a graphics processing unit to mine the new cryptocurrency that has roots in the original Bitcoin.

However, Bitcoin Gold has essentially zero chance of replacing Bitcoin in the marketplace as a ‘fork,’ it’s more of an air-drop than a chain split. And, as such, its entrance onto the stage, has been less than impressive.

Massive DDoS attack

As Bitcoin Gold split, a tweet was sent out that alerted the community that a massive DDoS attack had hid the site.

"Massive DDoS attack on our cloud site," stated a tweet from the Bitcoin Gold account. "10M requests per minute. We are working with the providers to ban all the IPs. We will be up soon!"

Massive DDoS attack on our cloud site. 10M requests per minute. We are working with the providers to ban all the IPs. We will be up soon! — Bitcoin Gold [BTG] (@bitcoingold) October 24, 2017

This means what probably happened was a network of hijacked devices were accessing the Bitcoin Gold site 10 mln times a minute in order to block out legitimate traffic.

At 10 mln attacks a minute, it was a rather large hijacking, but still not the biggest. However, on the Bitcoin Gold Slack channel, it was announced that most of the attacks were emanating from China.

Hours later, Bitcoin Gold tweeted that the attack had been "handled" but that "it will take a bit more time" for the site to be operating normally.

A long road for Bitcoin Gold

Although it is calling itself a fork, Bitcoin Gold really does not satisfy many of the presumed attributes of a forked currency, and its operation and application have been shaky already.

The team has given itself a soft deadline of Nov. 1 to "launch" the coin properly by releasing the code and allowing people to mine it. At this time people will also receive a mirror balance of their Bitcoin in Bitcoin Gold.

There have been warnings and non-support from many exchanges about Bitcoin Gold; however, there is still interest about for the chance of being additionally credited the equivalent amount of Bitcoin Gold.

Bitcoin Gold futures were trading at $117.50 per coin on Bitfinex the day after the split.