Could Bitcoin Gold Overtake the Original Bitcoin?

The new bitcoin gold cryptocurrency has got off to an interesting start in life. It just went live on the 12th of November and has already been through some turbulent times.

Yet, many analysts believe that the toughest part is over and that this currency will soon show its worth. Some have even suggested that it may turn out to be stronger in the long term than the original bitcoin.

Troubles weren’t difficult to find on the first couple of days. For example, one of the mining pools – known as pool.gold – ran into problems when a denial of service attack caused them to be offline for about an hour and a half.

Once they were back up and running things got more complicated, as pool.gold and another mining pool called Suprnova found blocks simultaneously, causing the blockchain to split. After some confusion, mining was stopped on one of the chains and the other was confirmed as the ledger of record, meaning that some miners lost out on cash they thought they have earned.

This has led to some miners criticising the way that bitcoin gold has begun life in such an erratic, stop-start way. The developers of bitcoin gold have come in for criticism, with some people unhappy that they apparently set aside a number of coins for themselves at the beginning before leaving everyone else to get on with it.

Yet, it isn’t all bad news. For example, when asked about the $70,000 worth of coins lost when the pool.gold chain split, developer Martin Kuvandzhiev said that the unlucky miners would be given coins from the development team’s allocation. Kuvandzhiev said that these miners “deserve it”, and that the situation was handled correctly.

Some people see this as a sign that bitcoin gold is going to be run fairly and sensibly. It was also pointed out that 40% of the 100,000 coins that the development team have set aside are there to be spent in situations like this, provided that 4 of the 6 developers sign the transaction. The rest of this allocation is time-locked so that it can be spent on development costs in the future.

Bitcoin gold has been well received overall in the digital currency community. For example, popular wallet provider Coinomi has started supporting it since the launch date. Further support from exchanges and wallet providers is expected to be confirmed in the next few days.

Yavor Todorov is a bitcoin gold developer. He pointed out that there was “chaos on social media” but that the actual network was running fine. In terms of mining power, it is reported that some 50,000 machines are mining the new currency, split over a few mining pools.

Early reports suggest that bitcoin gold is proving increasingly popular with the public, as people begin to become aware of the new currency option. Regular transactions are being carried out, although at a substantially lower volume that the original bitcoin and bitcoin cash so far.

Some sources suggest that there are investors cashing out of bitcoin and into bitcoin gold. It may have had a rough start but it is clear that this is something well worth keeping an eye on.