Bitcoin Gold (BTC) Overview: A strange case of high value coin with almost no activity and community following
Bitcoin Gold is currently way off its glory days and all-time highs. After peaking in early August at $27,79/398144 satoshi, the currency dropped to monthly lows of $15.42/258428 satoshi. It kept hovering around 300 thousand satoshi for quite some time before it decided to start slowly going upwards on September 12th. The currency has been in this uptrend ever since and it peaked on the 26th at $24.19/370281 satoshi.
One BTG can be purchased for $23.66 USD (9.79% rise in the last 24 hours)/366836 satoshi (8.83% rise in the last 24 hours). Daily trade volume has picked up as of late and is sitting at 2,459 BTC, most of it coming from Bithumb (47%) and Bitfinex (8.7%). With a market cap of $408,298,350, Bitcoin Gold is currently the 23rd most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
An up-and-coming trader babelii posted this analysis of Bitcoin Gold’s technicals.
Created after parts of the original Bitcoin community decided to move from SHA 256 algorithm to Equihash, in an effort to have a cryptocurrency that is resistant to ASIC mining, Bitcoin Gold has went through an existence that was somewhat mired by negatives. From DDoS attacks, issues with community/exchange recognition and acceptance, a (slightly) delayed launch and major security breaches, including fake BTG wallets being promoted by the project’s official social media and the latest double spend/51% attack the currency suffered in May this year, a lot has gone wrong.
The mentioned double spending attack recently broke the camel’s back as Bittrex, a rare bigger exchange that originally supported the currency, decided to delist Bitcoin Gold just a couple of weeks ago. Apparently the exchange didn’t like the fact that the attack made them lose around 388,000 BTG ($18 million at the time) and was even less happy that the project refused to pay a much-lessened compensation for this loss:
“Bittrex informed us that they make this decision because the BTG team would not “take responsibility for our chain,” and that taking responsibility meant paying Bittrex 12,372 BTG to cover the loss they incurred. They later informed us they would cover part of the loss from their own BTG reserves and requested we pay the remaining ~6,000 BTG ($127,000), and that if we did not, we would be delisted,” said this official statement regarding the issue made by the Bitcoin Gold team. Bittrex turned the blame on BTG’s PoW algorithm; Bitcoin Gold claimed that their team “is not responsible for security policy within private entities like Bittrex”. The delisting was greeted with an overwhelming approval of the general crypto community.
?What are bitcoin forks anyways?
The lack of liquidity caused by Bitfinex delisting was mitigated just hours ago, as the team’s official Twitter account popped up with the following announcement:
Bithumb Korean exchange adds abundant liquidity to the $BTG Market, showing Korean investor's confidence!
-Available pair: BTG/KRW
-Trading Fee: 0.15%
-Advanced trading tools and charts
=> https://t.co/3PhPha90xmThanks, @BithumbOfficial for supporting decentralization! pic.twitter.com/SQjKfpcjyy
— Bitcoin Gold [BTG] (@bitcoingold) September 27, 2018
The significance of this can be seen at the beginning of the article, where you can notice that Bithumb is currently responsible for half of the total daily trade volume of BTG. This will likely drop off as the initial trade demand wanes but it’s pretty safe to say that pairing the currency with Korean won will result in new investment into the currency.
However, as Redditor hapticpilot summed it up nicely:
”
There’s very little activity in the core software (their one full node implementation) and there only appears to be 1 anonymous developer doing most of the work.
It doesn’t appear to have a significant community following. Their primary subreddit ( r/BitcoinGoldHQ ) is dead and there isn’t much happening on the official forum either.
Since it’s inception it has been plagued with strange events and technical issues. The Github for the full node software got compromised. The official BTG website linked to a scam wallet at launch that stole funds from people. It suffered a 51% attack early on. There have been many other issues too.
The slogan is “make Bitcoin decentralized again”, but it doesn’t do that. It’s not Bitcoin.
The main selling point of BTG appears to be “mining decentralization”, but there are literally 100s of other coins that have this focus, but unlike BTG, many of these other coins actually have large development teams and bring something unique or valuable to the market.
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Bitcoin Gold isn’t exactly the currency with the best past. Some of their previous mishaps and issues were supposed to be fixed with a hard fork but overall this didn’t help much, at least price-wise. They say you need to start off with a solid grounding to build anything stable and long lasting in life. Judging by what Bitcoin Gold has on offer right now, stability is the last term that comes to mind.
