Things have certainly calmed since the fork, with Bitcoin surging to a September high $4,909.11, before some easing following China’s decision to shut down Bitcoin exchanges and ban initial coin offerings.

So, while many will have been looking ahead to the much talked about November SegWit2x fork, where another split is anticipated, which could result in 3 versions of Bitcoin, few have discussed or focused on this month’s Bitcoin Gold fork, which is scheduled to be implemented on 25th October.

So why yet another fork? The Bitcoin community is looking to completely decentralize the Bitcoin network that continues to be monopolized by the mining industry and a few miners within the mining community, who have the majority of the hash power at present.

Bitcoin Gold is scheduled for release through this month’s fork in a bid to change Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm, allowing miners to mine Bitcoin with GPUs.

As with Bitcoin Cash this summer, Bitcoin Gold will also be a hard fork, with the new tokens expected to launch on 25th October before being open to exchanges from 1st November.

Making it possible to mine with GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) is expected to allow more participants to mine, taking away some of the hash power from the bigger miners who have largely cornered the Bitcoin market.

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The new BTG token is planned to be sold at 10BTG to 1 BTC and while there are plans for a Bitcoin Gold initial coin offering, dates have yet to be announced and as with Bitcoin Cash, each Bitcoin user, at the time of the fork, will have an equal amount of Bitcoin Gold associated with their private key.

What is Bitcoin Gold Fork?

On 25th October, Bitcoin is going to see another hard fork implemented that will result in a new cryptocurrency named Bitcoin Gold (BTG). As we saw with Bitcoin Cash in the summer, existing private keys holding Bitcoin balances will receive the same amount in Bitcoin Gold on 1st November, though as things stand, it may be a number of weeks before Bitcoin Gold will be tradable.

Developers, miners and a number of key contributors including Jack Liao, the CEO of Hong Kong mining manufacturer LightningAsic, are behind Bitcoin Gold, with other parties involved including Chinese mining tycoon and owner of Bitcoin news portal Jinse.com and the project’s anonymous lead developer H4x3.

For now, Bitcoin Gold has been characterized as a friendly fork by the development team as Bitcoin Gold considered to be complementary to Bitcoin. The key consideration is to block anticipated upgrades of Bitcoin through hard forks.

H4x3 describes Bitcoin gold as a real blockchain to pilot Bitcoin upgrades. Ultimately, the purpose of Bitcoin Gold is to compete with Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and GPU coins, by bringing down the current Bitcoin mining monopolies and increasing centralization in order to serve and protect the Bitcoin world.

Supporters of Bitcoin Gold hold the view that the best crypto engineers are working on Core and for this reason, Bitcoin Gold will try to follow Core as much as possible.

The biggest change to the code in Bitcoin Gold is that it uses a different mining algorithm, resistant to ASIC chips, called Equihash. Similar to Ethereum, the use of GPUs will be needed to mine Bitcoin Gold in place of Bitcoin’s current Asics mining machines, which have been blamed for the centralization of Bitcoin.

With Ethereum’s planned switch from Proof of Work mining to Proof of Stake next year, Bitcoin Gold developers’ decision to move away from Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm to the Equihash algorithm is a timely one.

Other anticipated changes from Bitcoin include an alteration to the adjustment time. Bitcoin has the level of difficulty to solve a block adjusted every 2-weeks and, with unstable hashpower experienced since the Bitcoin Cash fork, Bitcoin Gold will have the level of difficulty adjusted to every block found.

While miners are yet able to test-mine Bitcoin Gold, plans are in place to enable miners to test on a testnet within the next couple of weeks, though there has yet to be the replay protection coding that will protect Bitcoin Gold users from accidentally spending real Bitcoin or Bitcoin Gold, also referred to as a replay attack.

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It all certainly sounds friendly enough, if you’re not one of the mining cartels that control much of the Bitcoin hashpower, though there has been some dissatisfaction over news that developers will be the only miners for a period of time after the hard fork.

The Bitcoin Gold fork is another battle in the war between the mining cartel and Bitcoin’s core developers. The mining cartel in search of even more hashpower and centralization, while Bitcoin’s core developers look to reverse the centralization that has been seen in recent years.