Bitcoin Gold (BTG) Rekenmachine

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) split from Bitcoin in October 2017 with the declared aim of “making Bitcoin decentralized again,” freezing the Bitcoin ledger at block height 491407 and launching a chain designed for everyday miners under pale, machine-lit auroras; it replaced Bitcoin’s SHA-256 with a memory-intensive Equihash variant and later shifted to Equihash 144,5 (often called Zhash) to blunt ASIC dominance and favor GPUs with substantial memory bandwidth, thereby broadening participation in proof-of-work consensus while keeping a familiar cadence: about 10-minute blocks, a capped supply of 21 million, and halving events every 210,000 blocks that step block rewards down on the same schedule as Bitcoin (e.g., from 12.5 to 6.25 and onward), preserving the scarcity script while attempting to widen who can help secure the network; the project introduced two-way replay protection and distinct address formats to prevent cross-chain transaction replays after the fork, retained SegWit compatibility inherited from Bitcoin, and implemented a more responsive difficulty adjustment to cope with volatile hashrate typical of GPU-mined networks; despite these design choices, BTG’s history includes multiple 51% attacks and double-spend incidents that prompted countermeasures such as parameter changes, enhanced monitoring, and checkpointing, yet also raised ongoing concerns about finality and exchange risk, especially given a comparatively smaller miner base; the chain’s throughput remains Bitcoin-like-limited by block intervals and size-so transaction capacity is modest, and while GPU mining accessibility democratized participation to some extent, adoption has lagged behind larger networks, leading to a leaner developer community, lower on-chain activity, and fewer integrations; BTG’s governance centers on an open-source, community-forward model supported by a developer fund seeded via an early post-mine of approximately 100,000 BTG, intended to finance growth and maintenance but often cited in debates about incentives and decentralization; in practice, miners favor GPUs with ample VRAM for Equihash 144,5, and users can leverage wallets that support the unique BTG address prefixes and SegWit formats, yet the network’s most durable narrative remains its attempt to turn specialized machines into mirrors rather than masters, keeping the door ajar for standard hardware to help uphold a peer-to-peer electronic cash system under a sky of predictable issuance and transparent rules.