A lot of people have all but forgotten about Bitcoin Gold at this stage. This so-called “fork of Bitcoin” has run into some issues launching its mainnet over the past few weeks. We now have an official launch date, as the network is slated to go live on November 12th at 7 PM UTC. Whether or not there is still significant interest in BTG at this point remains to be seen. A few people will still want their free coins, though.

Bitcoin Gold Launch Date is Confirmed

There has been a fair amount of debate and speculation on Bitcoin Gold over the past few weeks. What was originally designed to be a Bitcoin hard fork eventually turned into a completely different altcoin which only barely resembles Bitcoin in certain respects. The thing most Bitcoin holders care about is obtaining their free Bitcoin Gold in the coming days, as the BTG developers snapshotted the Bitcoin blockchain to conduct their airdrop sometime in the future. It seems that future will become reality on November 12th at 7 PM UTC.

While it remains to be seen how many people still care about Bitcoin Gold right now, no one will decline an airdrop of free coins by any means. The actual value of BTG tokens has yet to be determined, but with the launch having been pushed back by nearly two weeks, the project has lost a lot of its initial appeal. Even back then, the general response to this “fork” was pretty lackluster at best. Alas, it is doubtful much has changed in this regard.

On the aforementioned date, the full node client download will be provided on the Bitcoin Gold website. It is expected this client will work on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, although it remains to be seen how everything will play out. The Equihash proof-of-work change has been finalized and should be capable of handling a public stress test at launch. The number of miners directing some of their mining hardware to Bitcoin Gold may not necessarily be all that large, though. Until it is known whether or not BTG is even remotely profitable to mine, no one should expect any major interest in this altcoin off the bat.

More importantly, it seems the Bitcoin Gold developers have finally succeeded in adding proper replay protection to their clone. It is important to have such security in place. Without it, Bitcoin users would theoretically be able to send funds to the BTG blockchain and vice versa. This would result in lost funds, which is never fun to deal with. Bitcoin Gold will use the same address code base as Bitcoin itself, which makes full replay protection a mandatory part of its source code. There has been some controversy over this development as well, but it seems everything has been ironed out as of now.

Additionally, the developers made some last-minute changes to the BTG mining difficulty algorithm. Considering that this difficulty will change from block to block, it is of the utmost importance that it be adjusted to dynamic hashing power increases and decreases. That is much easier said than done, for obvious reasons. Once the network goes live, the whole world will be able to see if these efforts have paid off. We don’t want another algorithm that can be “tricked” into making a currency more profitable, as we have seen how that has impacted Bitcoin Cash in the past.

There is still a fair bit of work to do for the Bitcoin Gold team, though. First of all, there is no real appeal to this altcoin as it offers nothing innovative or unique. Nor can it be used to pay for goods and services in its current stage. The list of exchanges and wallets supporting Bitcoin Gold is also very limited, mainly because the launch of this network was delayed. An interesting future awaits BTG; that much no one can deny.