What Is Bitcoin Gold And Why Is It Skyrocketing In Defiance Of Market-Wide Sell-Off?

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is defying the wider market-wide sell-off on Friday, gaining over 52% in 24 hours leading to press time.

BTG and BTC Two Different Coins: BTG emerged after a hard fork of Bitcoin (BTC) on Oct. 24, 2017. The developers of BTG at the time had the stated goal of trying to decentralize the BTC mining which increasingly required application-specific integrated circuits or ASICs hardware.

BTG on the other hand utilizes an algorithm called Equihash, which its backers believe is incapable of being sped up with hardware such as ASICs.

BTG can be mined with Graphics Processing Units or GPUs which according to the project’s website restores “decentralization and independence.”

Another notable hard fork of BTC led to the emergence of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which too took place in 2017. That cryptocurrency emerged as a result of an attempt by some developers and users to avoid certain protocol updates to BTC’s blockchain.

BTG traded 52.5% higher at $129.39 at press time. The cryptocurrency has soared 1,147% since the year began, while BTC traded 9.9% lower at $48,778, while BCH traded 17.8% lower at$755.70.

BTG On The Upswing: Amid a wider market sell off that has plunged cryptocurrency market cap below $2 trillion level to $1.78 trillion, BTG has been an outlier.

See Also: Dogecoin Falls Below 20 Cents, Bitcoin Below $50K Amid Wide Sell-Off, But These Two Cryptos Are On A Run Today

Binance announced trading support for a number of BTG pairs last week. These include BTG and Binance USD (USD), BTG, and Tether (USDT).

Another reason for the price movement in BTG could be its ticker’s similarity with a new Bitcoin fund from Brazillian investment bank BTG Pactual, which is teaming up with the Winklevoss brothers’ Gemini exchange, Cointelegraph reported.

Benzinga’s Take: There is a high probability of investors confusing various Bitcoin forks and the actual BTC. Investors should do due diligence and carefully look up the correct cryptocurrencies before making purchases.

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