Bitcoin Gold makes use of Equihash-BTG, also known as Equihash(144,5) or Zhash, in order to mine new blocks and add them to the network. Equihash was designed to use more memory in the mining process than an ASIC, which enables miners to use graphics cards to validate transactions.
Equihash makes Bitcoin Gold mining more dispersed, and that’s really the only modification BTG brought to the BTC code. The coin has exactly the same block generation time of 10 minutes, the block reward of 12.5 BTG, and a maximum supply of 21 million, just like Bitcoin.
What Makes It Unique?
Bitcoin Gold has been so far the only Bitcoin fork to integrate a proof of work algorithm that is ASIC-resistant. In addition to a different hashing algorithm, Bitcoin Gold uses another difficulty adjustment with every block. Instead of increasing the difficulty every 2 weeks like BTC, it is increased based on past block times.
BTG is also among the only Bitcoin forks which have implemented Segregated Witness (SegWit) technology and replay protection. SegWit increases the number of block transactions, and replay protection stops parallel transactions on two forks.
Another thing is that Bitcoin Gold is not in direct competition with Bitcoin like the other forks, as its anti-ASIC algorithm means that none of the BTC miners will be motivated to switch to mining BTG.
Bitcoin Gold is similar to Bitcoin in almost any other aspect, aside from the mining algorithm. GPU mining is less intensive form a computational stand-point, which enables more people to mine BTG.
The downside is that BTG has been involved in several scandals since its early days. The team behind BTG “post-mined” 100,000 coins after the launch, which made the community doubt the competency and intentions of the founders.
Unlike other crypto projects that promote transparency, the team has not revealed the source code of their network, which made even more people distrust the coin. There were also some security issues with the blockchain.