Bitcoin Gold, another Bitcoin fork, on the way

A third fork in the blockchain technology Bitcoin is reported to occur in October, adding Bitcoin Gold to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
When the first hard fork occurred, and Bitcoin Cash came into the picture, many believed that it was the first of many hard forks. That turned out true sooner than expected, with another hard fork with the name Bitcoin Gold expected to happen in late October.

The team behind the hard fork is led by CEO of LightningASIC, Jack Liao. Bitcoin Gold is reported to launch on October 25th and go live on November 1st. The team has said that their aim is to improve the protocol and challenge Bitcoin Cash. There is no concrete news about an ICO yet.

Many people believe that this hard fork is unwanted and will only divide the blockchain community further without adding anything to it. The Bitcoin Cash hard fork only resulted in a much smaller Bitcoin network worth about 12% of bitcoin’s value. A lot of people in the blockchain sector believe that Bitcoin Gold will face a similar fate. However, the developers behind it offer a different opinion.

The primary motive of the team behind Bitcoin Gold is to make the mining process more decentralized. The current mining algorithm sees a great reliance on GPUs, while Bitcoin Gold aims to bring graphics cards into the picture as well. This, they think, will take away the importance of some of the more prominent miners and make mining as a process much more decentralized. Liao cited the dominance of Bitamin in the mining industry as something that shouldn’t exist within the blockchain industry. They want to change the proof-of-work that currently exists to make it less optimized for GPU mining.

Some believe that this could actually be worth doing. The fact that sitting at the core of this idea is Jack Liao, someone from China, adds more weight to the matter as China is the leader when it comes to bitcoin mining. However, there are others who think that this move, as well as the idea to bring graphics cards, won't help decentralize the mining process in the way the Bitcoin Gold team thinks. Since the GPU market is dominated by Nvidia and AMD, there’s no way to prevent the centralization of the mining process to some degree.

The details regarding Bitcoin Gold are currently quite vague. While Bitcoin Cash increases the block height to 8 MB, there is no news about the block height of Bitcoin Gold. Lead developed H4x said that things like that were still being worked out. He also said that this is more of an experiment to see how hard forks fare in the long run.

While Bitcoin users will get an equal share of Bitcoin Gold until the fork occurs properly and the two go their separate ways, there’s no telling if Bitcoin Gold will suffer the same fate as Bitcoin Cash and cause more disarray, or make things more decentralized.