Trezor, makers of one brand of hardware wallet, revealed that the source code of Bitcoin Gold (BCG) has been released and that the Trezor wallet will add support for the currency in the upcoming weeks.

 

 

What happened to Bitcoin Gold?

The Bitcoin Gold hard fork was expected to occur in late October, led by Jack Liao, CEO of LightningAsic. The initial goal of Bitcoin Gold was to provide an ecosystem wherein mining is more decentralized across a larger community by closing the gap between GPU or CPU miners and ASIC miners.

As Bitcoin developer and Paxos principal architect Jimmy Song wrote:

“The goal of BTG is to become a better gold than Bitcoin. The chief way they have decided to do this is trying to solve miner centralization through a proof-of-work change. Changing proof-of-work is generally going to require a hard fork and BTG has decided to go that route. The proof-of-work that they’ve chosen is Equihash, a memory-hard algorithm that’s fairly ASIC resistant and also used by ZCash.”

The launch of Bitcoin Gold has been delayed for many weeks, and as a result, their development team has struggled to provide a specific date for the execution of the hard fork. After weeks of delay, the Bitcoin Gold development team has released their source code on GitHub, officially initializing the project.

Issues with liquidity and trading

Some of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the Bitcoin sector including ShapeShift, Bithumb, Bitfinex and Bittrex adopted Bitcoin Cash relatively quickly subsequent to its hard fork in August. This provided useful price discovery for the market and created a way for Bitcoin investors to easily sell their Bitcoin Cash tokens.

However, because of the lack of both community and industry support behind the Bitcoin Gold hard fork, major businesses and trading platforms are currently reluctant toward integrating support for Bitcoin Gold. At present, the only trading platform that will likely process Bitcoin Gold trades is Bitfinex, as it already has introduced Bitcoin Gold futures market on its trading platform.

For the most part, the reluctance towards the Bitcoin Gold hard fork from the community comes from the Bitcoin Gold development team’s decision to include a premine mechanism, wherein developers are able to mine BCG before miners in the market can begin producing BCG.

Tim Enneking, managing director of Crypto Asset Management, stated:

"Miners control too much of the space to allow Bitcoin Gold to be successful – at least in the near term.”

Following its debut, Bitcoin Cash price stabilized at around $300. However, once the SegWit2x project was canceled, Bitcoin Cash surged as high as $2,600 before falling to half that level. Even with support from Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin mining manufacturer and operator of the largest Bitcoin mining pool in the industry, Bitcoin Cash debuted at $300.

Given the lack of community and industry support for Bitcoin Gold, it is unlikely that BCG will debut at a value higher than the initial value of Bitcoin Cash at $300.

More important, because Bitcoin Gold lacks strong replay protection, only a handful of companies, wallet platforms and exchanges including Trezor will add support for Bitcoin Cash, restricting the market and liquidity of BCG.