It is safe to say things are getting incredibly ridiculous in the world of Bitcoin “offspring” right now. Bitcoin Gold is already a big joke as it is. To make matters even worse, we now have a Bitcoin Silver as well. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before we see a Bitcoin Bronze, Platinum, or who knows what else. Surprisingly, Bitcoin Silver and Bitcoin Gold are pretty similar in certain ways.
Bitcoin Silver is a Horrible Joke
While there are many differing opinions regarding the future of Bitcoin, not everyone needs to create his or her own coin to get a point across. Given the fact that Bitcoin is completely open source, it isn’t entirely surprising to see people take its source code, modify it, and spin it as if it’s a brand new coin. That seems to be happening right now with Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Silver. It’s the latter creation in particular which raises a lot of questions that will need to be answered sooner or later.
The Bitcoin Silver announcement on BitcoinTalk.org only confirms how much of a joke this project is. It uses the exact same mining algorithm as Bitcoin Gold, claims to be a hard fork of Bitcoin – which it isn’t – and aims to create value out of thin air. However, it does offer replay protection, which is something Bitcoin Gold has yet to implement. Its blocks will be 30 seconds apart on the network as well, which is pretty interesting.
The objective of this new cryptocurrency is to create a more decentralized version of Bitcoin as we know it. The issuance of new coins will start in December of this year, although no specific date has been announced as of right now. At that point in time, miners will begin the process of generating new coins using the Equihash mining algorithm.
As with Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Silver’s developers – lacking any reputation or Github link whatsoever – claim that their new “fork” will branch off the Bitcoin blockchain. However, it is far more likely the developers will snapshot the Bitcoin blockchain and decide to issue a lot of coins later on. After all, that is how we will see the issuance of BTG take place in the long run. It is unclear if Bitcoin Silver will have a premine, but that appears likely.
So far, the initial response to this new Bitcoin “fork” has been anything but positive. That shouldn’t really surprise anyone right now, as there is no need for this clone of Bitcoin Gold to begin with. In fact, one can argue Bitcoin Gold itself shouldn’t even be around, but that is a matter of opinion. Without any official Github repo or piece of code to look at, no one will take Bitcoin Silver any more seriously than they do Bitcoin Gold. These free “airdrops” have to end sooner or later, as things are getting out of hand in our opinion.
The bigger question is whether or not any (greedy) exchange will decide to support Bitcoin Silver in the future. It is evident this concept makes no sense and serves no real purpose whatsoever. Nor should it, for that matter, as no one asked for Bitcoin Silver to be created in the first place. This is a clear cash grab by some desperate developers who missed out on buying Bitcoin initially and just wish to capitalize on all of the hard fork momentum. This situation has quickly gone from bad to worse.
