Bitcoin Gold Responds to Bitmain's New ASIC Miner for Equihash

Bitcoin Gold(BTG), one of the most popular Bitcoin forks, has gone on the record to reinforce the projects dedication to being ASIC-resistant.

The announcement, entitled ‘A Response to the ASIC Threat’, is directly related tonews put out by Chinese crypto-mining giantBitmain, who confirmed release of its new “ASIC” miner capable of mining Bitcoin Gold.

ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated chip”, essentially a computer chip designed for a single set of processes, In this case, Bitmain’s new chip is designed to compute a specific algorithm – the Equihash algorithm – which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Gold use for mining purposes. ZCash (ZEC) also uses the Equihash algorithm.

Part of the statement reads:

ASIC-resistance is central to our mission. Bitcoin Gold, BTG, was conceived while watching the struggle between ASIC miners and the rest of the Bitcoin community. The fundamental reason for BTG’s creation was to help wrest back the crypto space from the relentlessly monopolizing tendencies of ASIC mining. How? By returning mining power to commodity hardware that is more universally accessible to people around the world: GPUs, or “graphics cards,” which nearly anyone can acquire and use.”

The original codename for Bitcoin Gold was “BTCGPU” – GPU relating to consumer-level graphics card chips.

To prove their dedication to fighting industrialised mining, the development team is prepared to either modify the algorithm used by Bitcoin Gold or even propose an entirely new one for mining purposes.

This comes just weeks after the developers of privacy coinMonero (XMR)declared war on ASIC-mining, Changes were implemented that resulted in a hard fork which created four additional blockchains.

CNBC reported, using estimates from Wall Street investment firmBernstein Research, Bitmain turned a profit of somewhere in the range of US$3 billion and US$4 billion in operating profits from the sale of their ASIC-mining chips and their cryptocurrency mining operations in 2017. Mainstay graphics card maker Nvidia posted similar profits.

It has only taken Bitmain four years to achieve these numbers, whileNvidia has been operating for twenty-four.

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