Missed the Bitcoin Rally? Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is pumping forward

Bitcoin Gold has cracked the USD 100 mark again after three years. Not without reason: the coin should be breathed back into life with new projects and partnerships. Will the rebirth succeed?

The crypto market crash of 2018 buried quite a few coins under itself. Bitcoin Gold also disappeared for a long time – and is now celebrating its comeback. 250 percent in two weeks: The performance of Bitcoin Gold (BTG) brings back memories of the golden 2017 Bull Run days. The Bitcoin afterbirth is still miles away from its then all-time high of 456 US dollars. Gradually, however, the cryptocurrency, plagued by 51 percent attacks, seems to be regaining investor confidence. The involvement in Polkadot may also have contributed to this.

Bitcoin gold meets polkadot

About two weeks ago announced the Bitcoin Gold Organization partnered with Phala Networks, a developer platform for smart contract applications. Phala is part of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem and one of the hottest contenders for the coveted and limited Polkadot Parachain slots. Based on TEE (Trusted Environment Execution) technology, Bitcoin Gold was the first crypto asset to be connected to Polkadot by the Phala developers and has since been equipped for use in smart contract-based DeFi applications.

The polkadot door opener kissed the course awake from its long slumber. Although Bitcoin Gold has already been written off by some skeptics, the BTG growth curve has been pointing steeply upwards since then.

However, it remains to be seen how sustainable this upward trend is. The long dry spell was no coincidence. The crypto exchange Bittrex removed the coin from the platform back in 2018. The reason at the time: There is no market, i.e. no buyers for Bitcoin Gold.

Even today, market capitalization does not show that there is much demand. Although this has tripled since the Polkadot integration, with almost 1.8 billion US dollars BTG is only 66th in the crypto asset ranking. Of the three hard fork spin-offs Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and Bitcoin Gold, the latter has by far the lowest market capitalization.

In addition, the BTC offshoot has been the target of 51 percent attacks several times, which have permanently damaged trust in the security of the network. After the last wave of attacks at the beginning of last year, however, the developers came up with a new one BTG Core Wallet retrofitted. in the recent blog entry from March 3rd, the Bitcoin Gold Organization is therefore confident of victory. By using the BTG miners and the community, the attackers were finally “defeated”.

Bitcoin Gold: A New Hope

It seems like life has come back to the project since then. The developers have announced a number of projects with “new partners” that will be revealed in the coming weeks. To this end, an “updated roadmap” is also in the making. The Polkadot integration could only be the beginning of a new BTG chapter.

Whether Bitcoin Gold can build on the performance of the past few days or disappears into no man’s land after the pump ultimately depends on the community and thus on the activity of the miners. Because Bitcoin Gold has a crucial use case that triggered the spin-off from Bitcoin at the time. In contrast to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold can be minted with ordinary GPUs. Even more: the network is ASIC-resistant, the high-performance hardware of the Bitcoin miners cannot be used in the Bitcoin-Gold network. Behind this is a fundamental value proposition that the “original” has lost over the years. Because, according to the original idea, mining should be decentralized, accessible to everyone and possible without high costs. While a few mining pools have monopolized the Bitcoin hash rate, private miners can also participate in Bitcoin Gold.

But as noble as the idea is, in practice you also need enough miners to secure the network. The hash rate has doubled in the last two weeks. With currently 2.3 megahash per second but this is still in the range of insignificance. The hope of the loyal mining community now rests on the network effects. The developments around Bitcoin Gold could catalyze each other and also increase the mining incentive again in the coming period. The BTG Telegram Channel is correspondingly euphoric. “It’s a great opportunity for those who missed the BTC run,” writes one user. How long this upward trend will last is another matter.