Investing.com - After weeks of preparation, Bitcoin Gold officially launched on November 12th.
Bitcoin Gold is the second project to fork away from the Bitcoin Blockchain to create a new coin this year, after Bitcoin Cash. While Bitcoin Cash attempts to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem, Bitcoin Gold was created to fix what some developers saw as a decentralization problem in the original Bitcoin.
The original Bitcoin was supposed to have no central authority, with transactions processed by a vast peer-to-peer network of anonymous miners.
However, as Bitcoin soared in value, the mining industry became more centralized, dominated by a few companies that can afford expensive, more efficient mining equipment.
Bitcoin Gold uses a different algorithm called Equihash that takes away many of the advantages these mining companies have. This creates a more democratic and decentralized environment and puts the power back in the hands of the everyday user mining cryptocurrency on their PC.
The new cryptocurrency was created in a fork from the original Bitcoin, so if you owned Bitcoin before the split occurred, you now own an equal amount of Bitcoin Gold.
Investors are still trying to figure out what to make of Bitcoin Gold, and its value has fluctuated wildly between 200 and 450 dollars. Meanwhile, the original Bitcoin is now trading between six and seven thousand dollars.