Bitcoin Gold is a coin that hardforked in Bitcoin on October 24, 2017. Hard fork is a type of blockchain service update. However, unlike updates (soft forks) that improve existing services, hard forks make new services while leaving existing services intact. Simply put, Bitcoin continued to operate and created a new Bitcoin gold.

In fact, Bitcoin hard forks existed before Bitcoin Gold. It is Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which was born in August of the same year. At that time, Bitcoin saw a surge in users, increasing the data stored in each blockchain, and the transaction processing speed slowed significantly. Some even pointed out that there is a problem with using it as a means of payment.

As a result, some mining companies in China have come up with proposals to increase the capacity that can be stored in each block of Bitcoin. They hard forked Bitcoin and drastically increased storage capacity per block from 1MB to 8MB. Since then, with the emergence of “E-Cash” and “Bitcoin SV,” which have increased the speed of transactions in Bitcoin Cash, the trend to use Bitcoin as a practical means of transaction has intensified.

On the other hand, Bitcoin Gold put forward a position that Bitcoin should be grown as a decentralized currency rather than a payment method. At that time, some miners in Hong Kong began to take issue with the situation in which they had to use professional mining machines (ASICs) for Bitcoin mining around 2015. Previously, Bitcoin could be mined with a GPU of a general home computer, but the difficulty of calculations that must be solved for mining has increased, forcing the use of specialized devices.