Bitcoin Gold started, the "democratic" answer in Blockchain’s World

The newest fork of the bitcoin blockchain is officially live after a rocky start. Bitcoin Gold, or Bgold, officially went live on November 12 2017. It was created as a way to counter Bitcoin’s mining centralisation. Public mining has begun, and the media are reporting that already multiple mining pools have been opened. Aside from the pools, the code has also been released on GitHub.

As such, the launch caps a lengthy period of development for the cryptocurrency, which follows bitcoin cash, a near $30 billion network that split off from bitcoin earlier this summer. Bitcoin gold also represents the latest instance of an "airdropped" cryptocurrency forked from the main bitcoin chain, which is distributed to anyone who owned bitcoin at the time of the split.

Now, public mining for the cryptocurrency has begun, with several mining pools opening up in coordination with the launch. Yet the process of distributing the software – no small feat in a permissionless, open-ended environment – came with some complications.

As detailed in the project's official Slack channels, 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.

As might be expected, trading interest was heightened in the run-up to the launch, given that prior to the launch, several exchanges launched futures tied to bitcoin gold. The price of those futures has seen significant volatility in the past several days, exceeding $500 in value earlier this weekend.

It has been one hell of a November in the cryptocurrency universe. Bitcoin Cash, another bitcoin hard fork, replaced rivals Ethereum as the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, although for a short period of time. Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, congratulated Bitcoin Cash founders, adding “A key reason why I am now so confident in crypto is precisely the fact that there are so many different teams trying different approaches.”

Recently, the SegWit2x hard fork in Bitcoin, which was supposed to solve important issues of higher transaction costs and slower speeds, has been canceled owing to a lack of consensus and miners now seem to have shifted their attention on the existing Bitcoin derivatives.