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Bitcoin traders in India are watching with bated breath as the cryptocurrency underwent a second hard fork, creating a new offshoot bitcoin gold, which comes less than three months after bitcoin cash was created. The latest split, which happened on Tuesday, has created three variants of the virtual currency — bitcoin, bitcoin cash (BCH) and bitcoin gold (BTG).
The new cryptocurrency was formed after certain developers split the bitcoin’s blockchain, the technology and underlying code for the digital currency. BTG comes less than three months after BCH was created, while the very first one was mined on August 1, 2017.
Unlike the last fork, when many of Indian bitcoin exchanges had shutdown operations for 36 hours from July 31, this time they are watching the development, even though battle lines have been drawn across the world.
“Bitcoin gold has been active after the hard fork has occurred. It is in very crucial phase and we need to understand the pros and cons along with the market reaction towards the new cryptocurrency, before taking any decision in support of BTG,” said Hesham Rehman, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at Bitxoxo, an exchange for the cryptocurrency.
While many in the industry said that they did not know the exact timing of spilt, as BTG community is yet to release the news officially, there was a lot of clarity this time. “Not everyone could mine bitcoin as there were certain pools who had control to the mining process. Now, anyone with computer and a CPU (central processing unit) can mine a BTG as the process has been made much simpler,” Sathvik Vishwanath, Co-Founder and CEO at Unocoin, said. Even though it’s difficult to estimate the number of miners in India, industry puts bitcoin users in India to be about 10-15 lakh. “Too many forks are happening in the industry and these splits are created to influence miners to move to a new blockchain. A split happens only when about 51 per cent of the miners move to a new block chain,” Mohit Kalra, CEO & Co-Founder at Coinsecure, said.
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