On Thursday, Bitcoin price had an intra-day rally, increasing to $5,950, which is up $225, or 3.94%, close to the record high at $6,190. The price came down in the evening at $5,858.9. Ethereum, the biggest rival of Bitcoin, fluctuates close to the yesterday’s level at $295.44.
Bitcoin traders try to assess the impact of the recent hard fork that took place on Tuesday. The new cryptocoin that resulted of the fork – Bitcoin Gold, fell in price soon after BTC owners received their BTG.
A hard fork happens when the blockchain behind a cryptocurrency is split in two separate parts because of contradictory views between miners. It generally leads to the creation of a new coin.
Proponents of Bitcoin Gold say that their new coin might help the system become more decentralized by offering mining opportunities to average individuals. Currently, Bitcoin mining process is a very expensive effort, requiring special hardware systems called ASICs, which, because of the high price, are available only to mining companies and so-called pools.
Jimmy Song, a leading Bitcoin developer said: “Bitcoin Gold is the brainchild of Jack Liao and is launching as a hard fork of Bitcoin. The idea [of Bitcoin gold] is to give mining back to the users who can start using CPUs and GPUs to mine.”
Bitcoin Gold miners can use typical video card system (GPUs) rather than ASICs. The latter have the ability to mine Bitcoin 50 times faster than common GPUs, but their price is much higher.
According to a report published by blockchain.info, the top six mining pools in the world are all Chinese, which together make over 60% of computational power on the Bitcoin network.
Elsewhere, Bitcoin Cash increased by 2.05% to $335.10, Litecoin fell 0.5%, Ripple fell 0.06%, and Dash dropped by 1.8%.