Bitcoin Gold(BTG)

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit finalized the forfeiture of 69,370 BTC, Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin SV, and Bitcoin Cash, tied to the notorious Silk Road marketplace.

Bitcoin was established to offer an alternative currency to the conventional fiat currencies offered by governments and banking institutions. The project immediately became an instant success as more users got attracted to decentralization. Post-2013, many started to view Bitcoin as an investment vehicle that generates capital gains rather than the digital currency it was established […]

BTG Pactual, a leading Brazilian investment bank, has acquired Órama DTVM, a crypto-friendly brokerage. The deal, which encompasses the entire share capital of Órama, is valued at R$ 500 million.

BTG Pactual is known for launching cryptocurrency trading services for its customers and is also planning to launch its own stablecoin.

In one of the most exciting crypto announcements of the month, BTG Pactual – Latin America’s largest investment bank – revealed the launch of BTG Dol, the world’s first dollar-backed stablecoin to be created by an actual bank. BTG Dol has generated a lot of hype, but it’s not necessarily an exciting investment opportunity. Instead, […]

BTG Pactual, one of Latin America's largest investment banks, has introduced a dollar-backed stablecoin through its crypto platform Mynt.

The stablecoin BTG Dol will supposedly become the 23rd token available on the crypto platform Mynt.

The new USD-pegged stablecoin aims to help BTG Pactual’s customers interact between the traditional financial system and the digital economy.

Bitcoin Gold have finally released a statement regarding the MYBTGWALLET scam. The team behind bitcoin gold address several key points. Bitcoingold.org is an informational community website for the Bitcoin Gold open source project. We do not hold user funds. We work hard to fairly promote all third-party developers in the crypto community – large or small, established or new. All mining pools, explorers, wallets, and exchanges that announce their support of BTG and request to be listed are given an opportunity to freely promote their services to the community. Also in the interest of fairness, we share the news of new providers via social media, with retweets, shares, etc. Neither these actions nor listing on the bitcoingold.org site should be taken as endorsements of third parties. We cannot attest that they are currently safe nor that they always will be safe. When we receive verifiable reports that a website or app is a problem, we remove it from our site. We have voluntarily been looking into issues around a particular third-party provider previously listed on our site. Preliminary investigations indicated that at least some of the claims of theft by the mybtgwallet site are reliable. Like all third-party sites, that site was not in our control, but we immediately removed it from our pages. The team is working with security experts to get to the bottom of this issue. It appears the mybtgwallet online wallet site was modified by unknown parties long after it was originally published. We are closely following the ongoing investigation and expect all findings to be disclosed to the public as soon as it is appropriate to do so. The team will continue to cooperate in every way possible and work tirelessly in hopes of getting to the root of what happened. What does everyone think?

When Bitcoin Gold was first discussed prior to its launch, confusion ensued in the cryptocurrency community with users trying to determine what exactly it was that Bitcoin Gold meant by “pre-mining”. The confusion stemmed around the definition of the term and what it meant the new blockchain was attempting to do when it came to mining the new coins. A final clarification on this issue came through Bitcoin Gold’s website. According to the full, detailed explanation given on the site, the pre-mine was actually a post-mine as it didn’t occur until the fork had been finalised. After the fork completed, 100,000 coins were then mined by the development team. The rapid mining process was of approximately 8,000 blocks worth 12.5 BTG per block mined. According to the developers, the vast majority of the pre-mined coins have been put in an “endowment”, which will then be used to develop and look after the delicate ecosystem of Bitcoin Gold. Of the 100,000 coins that were mined, 5% was used as a bonus for the team behind the development work. Between the six key developers, this equates to about 833 coins per person. Not much has been said about this payout, apart from a brief acknowledgement on the Bitcoin Gold website that states the bonus was given as a reward for their key roles in getting the project off the ground in the months prior to the launch. The 95% of the initial currency that wasn’t given to the developers as a bonus has been divided into time locked wallets. 60% of the coins are locked up to be released in three years' time, while the remaining 35% has been put into immediate use to help build and maintain the platform.

Originally, companies who need to fund their development cryptocurrency projects did so by providing Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). For those who need to do this fundraising, a new trend is emerging: the hard fork. The forks imply a protocol change that results in an old and a new version of a cryptocurrency. The developers have no monetary advantage as they only make a change. The holders of the original cryptocurrency keep hold of coins on both branches. This was especially true with Bitcoin Cash; this was a true Bitcoin fork that provided larger blocks. As the developers simply made a change to create larger blocks, they did not benefit financially from this project. It is, however, possible to create a fork where the developers do have a monetary advantage. In the case of Bitcoin Gold, premining was included. The developers begin the blockchain at a specific time and can then mine a certain number of blocks for themselves. The biggest advantage to splitting an established cryptocurrency is that you inherit the existing user base. The only way this can backfire is if the users decide to dump their “free” coins, which can be a disaster for developers looking to make money through the fork. If this dump of coins occurred, the price of the mined coins would drop to zero. ICOs are being attacked across the world as there are no safeguards in place to protect investors. As hard forks are simply a distribution of free tokens, this method should be much more widely accepted. Of course, it is still possible for investors to lose money if they purchase the coins and the prices drop. If a fork is being considered, going ahead with the one with the largest user base makes perfect sense. Bitcoin Cash’s success has sparked many new imitations including Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Silver and Bitcoin Diamond. As much as imitation can be a brilliant fork of flattery, the amount of forks Bitcoin currently has can become confusing to users and discredit the claim that there are only a limited number of Bitcoin available.

Bitcoin has now recovered its recent losses and stands at $7610, 5% up on the day so far - with BCH down a precipitous 18% at $1012, sicker than the supposedly doomed BTG, up over 5% at $168.53. There is nothing interesting in this except that volatility is good for price discovery and so lessens the risk of a bubble bursting. Meanwhile, volatility in the stock-markets is at an all-time low … The big fact is that the total market cap of the crypto-currency universe recently zoomed above $170 billion. Its robust health annoyed “analogue” money men such as Jamie Dimon, but frankly the longer they reject the emerging evidence, the better for Bitcoin investors. Liquidity is pouring into crypto-currencies and leaking away from the over-leveraged equities world. In a sense, Bitcoin has become a tail hedge against the money markets, especially because it is not correlated with other assets - and the possibility exists that it will actually prove to be inversely correlated once a major correction occurs in the NYSE and elsewhere. The decision by the CMI (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) to open a futures market in Bitcoin is notable, but the entire crypto capitalisation is effectively a big short against conventional finance, and seems to be enjoying its price gyrations. The CME restricts daily fluctuations to kindergarten levels compared to what the cryptos are used to, so it will be an interesting experiment. Money now flooding in is adding to earlier tiers - the Bitcoin mavens, mostly in the US, UK, Switzerland and Sweden; the occasional poker-players (Iran, Japan - where Bitcoin has just been pronounced legal tender); and now the gold-rush, with massive inputs in 2016 from Pacific Rim countries, and this year China in a big way, along with Denmark and Hungary (one report claims a 10x increase in June). India was also up 400% and Africa - Tanzania, Nigeria - just came online from zero to big. It’s going global.

On November 12, during a tumultuous weekend when Bitcoin saw a challenge thrown down by upstart Bitcoin Cash, another crypto was quietly launched: Bitcoin Gold. Its reception was either ignored or sneered at in the Press. Amidst headlines such as “Bitcoin Gold Fails To Impress Investors” and “Bitcoin Gold Goes Live After Bumpy Blockchain Launch”, it seemed the obituary was already being composed. But should we write off Bitcoin Gold? One of the strangest things for a coin apparently so pointless and doomed was the hostility Bitcoin Gold received in the run-up to its formal issuance, and not just from the crypto-press. A Twitter scam lured potential customers to malware sites, and someone invested in a full-scale DDOS attack on the Bitcoin team. That is a suspicious whole bunch of attention. So, why? Firstly it’s an alt-coin, which means that unlike Bitcoin Cash, for example, it’s not a branch of the original Bitcoin chain. Despite the name, holding it doesn’t mean you have Bitcoin. In that sense, it’s not a competitor - but in another sense, it could turn out to be a deadly rival for certain vested interests in the blockchain mining industry. The reason is that Bitcoin Gold-mining can be done on desktop computers as well as ASICS - industrialised chip arrays that now dominate Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin Gold uses Equihash (like ZCash does) and it is inherently democratic in its coin-creation algos, meaning CPUs/GPUs are more efficient than industrial miners when it comes to Bitcoin Gold. And, like Monero, there is robust-to-total replay protection. But therein lies the problem and maybe the source of the hostility. The big miners bet everything on Bitcoin Cash. If that doesn’t work (and it might not), they don’t want another rival they cannot control. Meanwhile, Bitcoin continues its wild gyrations, up again, currently $7,400 from $6,600 yesterday. Poor Bitcoin Gold is down nearly 25% today at $163. Perhaps it’s just worth a look.

Trezor, the makers of a popular hardware wallet, have revealed that the source code for Bitcoin Gold (BCG) has been publically released and so they will add full support for the new currency in the coming weeks. The Bitcoin Gold hard fork was originally expected to occur late in October, intended to provide a new system where mining is more decentralized across a larger community by closing the gap between GPU, CPU and ASIC miners. The launch of BCG was delayed by many weeks and so the development team struggled to give an exact date for when the hard fork would be executed. After weeks of delay, the developers behind BCG have released their source code, making the project’s initialisation official. Back in August following the Bitcoin Cash (BTC) hard fork, leading cryptocurrency exchanges took up BTC relatively quickly. However, this time around, the lack of community and industry support behind BTG means that major trading platforms are reluctant to integrate support for BTG. The majority of the reluctance towards BCG comes from the development team’s decision to include a premine mechanism that allows developers to mine BCG before the miners in the market can begin to produce it. This means that the general consensus of the industry is that the miners control too much to allow BCG to be truly successful in the short term. Following the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, the price stabilized at around the $300 mark. The cancellation of SegWit2x caused BTC to surge as high as $2,600, before settling at around the $1,100 mark. Even with the support of the largest operators in the industry, BTC still debuted at $300. The lack of support within the wider community for BCG makes it highly unlikely that the altcoin will debut higher than Bitcoin Cash’s initial value of $300. More importantly, BCG is severely lacking in market and liquidity support as only a handful of companies including Trezor will add support.

The second major Bitcoin fork, the Bitcoin Gold (BTG) altcoin, quietly launched into an industry that was largely confused by the ongoing events surrounding Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Gold was largely shunned by the cryptocurrency community as a whole. As Bitcoin Gold is not directly affiliated with the original Bitcoin blockchain, the community felt that BTG was lacking the technical robustness that they have come to expect. Since that rocky start, however, the currency is now mineable. However, prices are yet to show the significant support from the community that Bitcoin would have been hoping for. Over the weekend, the currency showed a major downturn, but prices tracked by Coinmarketcap did start to show a slight uptick by early Monday morning. The price of Bitcoin Gold had peaked on the 11th November at just under $500 per coin, which coincided with the all-time high of Bitcoin Cash at just under $2,400. Come the end of the weekend and Monday morning, however, and both of Bitcoin’s major forks had taken a knock. Bitcoin Cash has been hovering around the $1,100 mark; in terms of Bitcoin’s usual value, that is a loss of about 70%. The launch of Bitcoin Gold was complicated by a scam that had originated on Twitter. The malicious scam used a Twitter account that was specifically set up in order to trick users who were migrating to Bitcoin Gold into handing over their cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Gold (BTG) has been plagued since the very beginning. A major DDoS attack paralyzed the network that appeared to have been an effort to disrupt the planned launch of the altcoin. Fortunately, the team behind the Bitcoin Gold network managed to get it back up and running; even if it was a little later than originally planned.

Last Tuesday, Bitcoin Gold came into an existence after a new iteration of the original Bitcoin blockchain had forked off, just three months after the controversial Bitcoin Cash fork. While Bitcoin Gold has next to no chance of replacing the original Bitcoin in the marketplace, it has nevertheless caused small-scale market turbulence. The purpose of Bitcoin Gold is to adjust the blockchain in an attempt to once again make mining accessible to the general public. While major mining operators have essentially annexed the marketplace in 2017, some commentators consider Bitcoin Gold to be the solution for small-time miners. Robert Khune, a strategist involved in the Bitcoin Gold project, agrees: “Bitcoin has always had the ability to escape from any potential abusive mining hardware manufacturers”, explained Khune, adding that successful forks are “what will be required” in order to make mining fair and accessible to the public once again. Bitcoin downturn Bitcoin dipped 4.4% to $5,652 as of 8.55am on Wednesday (Eastern Time), however, the cryptocurrency is still up 36% this month and approximately six-fold percent compared to this time last year. The recent minor downturn has been driven by the anticipation of disarray as a result of expected hard forks in the near future, with an entire community of wallet holders divided over decisions to either support or reject these forks. Some are also speculating that the most recent fork could be an opportunity to essentially double their coins, as Bitcoin holders would also be credited with equal amounts in Bitcoin Gold – although few exchanges have offered their support when it comes to the new currency. A sign of things to come? Crypto experts are predicting that further splits are likely to be imminent, especially when certain factions of the community want to increase Bitcoin’s block size in order to make transaction times shorter. The first phase of this plan, titled SegWit2x, was implemented during the summer, when it took data off the main network – leading to widespread condemnation from many wallet holders and trading platforms alike – with some even urging users to dump SegWit2x Bitcoins immediately.