The Bitcoin Gold hard fork was put into effect a bit earlier than expected, about eight hours ago, but it is already facing attacks on all sides.
On the cyber security front, the team announced an hour ago that they are facing a massive DDoS attack on their cloud site, reaching 10 million requests per minute. However, they are working to ban all the IPs and promise to be back up soon.
A potentially much more long lasting attack on Bitcoin Gold is that on its investor relations front. More and more cryptocurrency services providers are coming out against the hard fork and warning that they will not list the new token under the current conditions. Most of these cite lack of transparency, incomplete code and related security concerns.
Background
The stated aim of Bitcoin Gold is to “make Bitcoin mining decentralized again”. The project is meant to disrupt the current mining market in which the manufacturing and distribution of mining equipment has become dominated by a handful of companies.
The developers say that by changing Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash, all of the specialized mining equipment will be obsolete in terms of mining the forked Blockchain . Thus, Bitcoin Gold will provide an opportunity for new people around the world to participate in the mining process with widely-available consumer hardware.
