Brace yourselves, the forks are coming

After a great recovery from the drop we had in September over the China situation, Bitcoin is going strong as ever and is now entering a rally phase. The rise anticipates the upcoming October and November hardforks and has given Bitcoin a massive push at the cost of the Altcoins, as investors and day traders alike consolidate to BTC in order to reap the fork rewards.

Most have heard by now, that there are going to be free coins at the end of the month due to some kind of fork...but what is Bitcoin Gold really?

Let's get a bit technical

Bitcoin is currently mined on hardware called ASIC. ASICs are Application Specific Integrated Circuits, which is a technical term for CPU's that are designed for a specific purpose only. ASIC hardware is used because it is significantly more efficient in mining the Bitcoin proof-of-work function (SHA256) than a traditional CPU. Let's do a comparison: a normal CPU can mine SHA256 at about 5-10MH/s where ASIC mines at 5-10TH/s.
Yep, that's right, an ASIC can mine 1 million times more work/second than a CPU!

So what's the problem?
Currently, ASIC's produced for Bitcoin mining are dominated by 3 companies: Canaan, Bitmain and Bitfury. So you could say, we have a mining hardware centralization issue in our decentralized currency. Gasp!

Enter Bitcoin Gold

Bitcoin Gold Mastermind, Jack Liao, aims to solve the hardware centralization problem by introducing a software change to the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm. The new algorithm is called Equihash (also used by ZCash) and will make Bitcoin Gold mining ASIC resistant, as it solves the difference in hardware efficiency. To be precise: ASIC's would only be about 100 times more efficient in mining Equihash than CPU's (1000-3000H/s Vs. 10-30H/s). We can confidently say that this achieves a fairer playing field in the hardware market, albeit at a cost of an overall decrease in mining efficiency.

So now that we know why there will be a proof-of-work update, how are they going to do it? You guessed right - with a hardfork. There isn't any other way really.

Fork Time

The Bitcoin Gold developes will pick a block on 25 October 2017 and fork from there. Practically, this means that the Bitcoin blockchain will get frozen on that day and new BTG blocks will get built on top of it later. However, don't expect the coins on that same day - the developers have announced that the release is scheduled for early November, so you might have to be little patient.

How to prepare for the fork

You don't really need to do much: just hold on to your Bitcoin during the hard fork and sometime in the beginning of November you will receive the exact same amount of Bitcoin Gold as you hold in Bitcoin. If you have your tokens stored on exchanges, I recommend moving them to a personal Bitcoin wallet, preferably one that gives lets you keep your private keys. A solid choice that let's you do that, is the Exodus Wallet. An even better choice is keeping your BTC safe in a Trezor hardware wallet, if you want maximum security.

If you want to keep your BTC on an exchange, they will most likely credit you with your Bitcoin Gold too, however you can expect a longer waiting time. A few exchanges have already made announcements about the way they will handle the hard fork, and I assume that the rest will follow in the upcoming weeks.

So that's it - hold on to your Bitcoin, and wait for your free coins to come in :^)

Yay! You've made it through this post! (ง'̀-'́)ง

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information source: link

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- Nick ( @cryptonik ) -