Bitcoin Gold, already a fork of Bitcoin, has announced an upcoming hard fork of its network. With this upgrade, the development team is looking to address two aspects that are making the network vulnerable - the threat of ASIC miners flooding the network and the possibility of future 51 percent attacks.
In the official announcement released on June 4, the team noted: “We’re doing this for two reasons: we need to address the threat of ASIC miners coming into the Equihash mining space, and we need to take steps to improve the security of our Blockchain in light of the recent 51% / Double Spend attacks.”
Bitcoin Cash was created in October 2017 by forking Bitcoin’s blockchain. To keep the existing ASIC miners of Bitcoin at a distance, the new coin uses the Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm, an alteration to Bitcoin’s hash algorithm. Although it has kept ASIC miners away until now, Bitmain’s introduction of a new mining device - the Antminer Z9 - opened the gates of Bitcoin Gold to ASIC miners.
In the new upgrade, the team is changing the existing Equihash algorithm with the new Equihash-BTG. This will increase the memory required by ASIC miners to perform mining activity and thus will make their mining business unprofitable.
Vulnerable network
Another major issue Bitcoin Gold developers are trying to fix is the vulnerability of the network to 51 percent attacks. The coin shares its algorithm with many Cryptocurrencies , and thus hash rates generated from a collective pool can easily exploit the network.
Moreover, Bitcoin Gold’s network was already compromised using a 51 percent attack last month which resulted in the theft of $18 million worth of BTG tokens.
The team is claiming that the introduction of the new algorithm will drastically reduce the required hash power which will make it very difficult to take similar control over the network.
According to the announcement, the development team has already started the process. However, the exact date of the migration is not revealed yet as it will take the involvement of all the stakeholders including wallets, exchanges, and mining pools.
