Bitcoin Gold (BTG) Current Live Value

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is a cryptocurrency that was the result of a 2017 hard fork from the original Bitcoin blockchain. The purpose of the fork was to combat the growing centralization of Bitcoin mining by incorporating features from Zcash (ZEC) that made it more difficult and expensive for dedicated mining pools to dominate. All other features of the coin remain essentially unchanged from the original blockchain protocol. The value of Bitcoin Gold dropped dramatically from the fork date only to revive during the subsequent 2018 digital currency boom. After the boom the price has steadily fallen to very low levels. It is now a top 30 crypto coin by total market cap.

The Bitcoin Gold fork was implemented exclusively to deal with the rise of ASIC miners using dedicated hardware for Bitcoin mining. These hardware miners were able to effectively price everyone else out of mining, thereby threatening the decentralization of the underlying cryptocurrency.

By increasing the cost of mining dramatically for enterprise-level miners, Bitcoin Gold became profitable for average users to mine again using traditional hardware, such as PCs. However, since its hard fork, it has experienced a number of controversies that have seen its price decline significantly from its post-fork levels.