Bitcoin Gold for free

Gold for free

Digital separatists want to make the cryptocurrency more democratic. And split it up now. However, critics doubt the measure. You suspect behind it a double game of the founders of Bitcoin Gold. It's about power.

Jack Liao is a separatist leader nobody knows. Sure, the now-deposed Catalan Speaker of Parliament Carles Puigdemont? Do you know by now? The pro-Russian rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko from Donetsk? Keep making headlines again and again. But Jack Liao? There are hardly a handful of video recordings on the Internet showing the Chinese. Smiling, with a blue shirt under which his small belly bulges, on the wrist two large clocks. This Chinese entrepreneur is now preparing to split the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

In the universe of crypto enthusiasts, Liao is in the midst of a power struggle. A small elite has become too influential in the Bitcoin universe, he criticized and his fellow campaigners. That's why the separatists decided to take a radical step: Under the leadership of Liao, they split off Bitcoin's own currency, the Bitcoin Gold. "Our goal is to decentralize Bitcoin again," write the project's founders on its website. However, many experts say: The whole action is questionable, Liao a half-dilated figure.

To understand this discussion, one must understand how Bitcoin works: unlike the euro or the dollar, the cryptocurrency is purely digital, so there are no bills or coins. In a network, subscribers can send money directly, without any banks. These transactions are then entered anonymously in a digital cash book, the so-called blockchain. All Bitcoin users can view them and control them together so that nobody cheats. Because it is not a particularly exciting matter to keep a cash book, so-called miners get money as an incentive.

Trojan horses could destroy the Bitcoin from within, experts fear

Once every private citizen could work with his home computer as a miner and earn money, this is now almost exclusively specialized, industrial high-performance computers possible. Because daily it gets more complicated to maintain the cash book. For private individuals, this special technology is hardly affordable, meanwhile, the four largest mining organizations have already seized more than half of this business.

With their critique of industrial mining, the digital separatists are encountering an important vulnerability of Bitcoin. For example, if a single miner controlled about 50 percent of the mining business, he could redirect payments into his own pocket. This would destroy users' trust in the currency and lead to a mass flight from the digital currency. "So just the developers of other cryptocurrencies could try to destroy the Bitcoin from the inside," says crypto expert Alexander Berentsen from the University of Basel.

The initiators of the currency separation, therefore, want to create an algorithm that breaks the monopoly of professional miners and virtually allows only conventional computers to run the cash book of Bitcoin brother. Their plan: Every Bitcoin holder who had Bitcoin in his digital wallet on October 24 will receive the same number of Bitcoin Gold units on the first of November - as a gift.

However, many experts doubt the split project and suspect that the founders of Bitcoin Gold are actually playing a double game. For spin-off initiator, Jack Liao sells on the Internet just those high-performance computers that made industrial mining possible. And especially for Bitcoin Gold, he now distributes normal graphics cards. In the end, Liao should benefit twice.

Before the development team activates the currency for all users, it wants to retain part of the money as a reward for their programming work, the developers said. "If you convert this sum immediately into dollars, they make a good cut," says Bitcoin expert Demelza Hays from the University of Liechtenstein

So far, the developers have not yet released the code of their cryptocurrency. With this, experts criticize, they also contradict their self-imposed goal: to decentralize Bitcoin. Because the mastery of knowledge is so far in the hands of a small circle that even experts hardly know. "It's so intransparent that I find it hard to trust this new currency," says Hays. At the request of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the developers stated that they could not publish the code because the work on it had not been completed.

New all-time high: Because of the split, a Bitcoin cost more than 6000 US dollars

On some cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitcoin Gold was tradable even before its actual launch on the first of November. Although the new currency is not yet officially activated, it was determined as early as October 24, the number of units Bitcoin Gold each user will be credited in early November. With these pre-calculated entitlements to Bitcoin gold can already act now: In preliminary trading rushed the price of the golden currency brother of $ 500 on issue down to now $ 123 down. The conventional Bitcoin, in turn, had become more expensive in the run-up to the spin-off in the meantime to over 6000 US dollars. Investors had quickly stocked up on it to get bitcoin gold in early November. In the meantime, however, the price has already dropped back to just under 5,800 US dollars.

For investors, however, such splits cause confusion, soon it is now synonymous Bitcoin Silver. "Many just want to use the good name Bitcoin to make money," says crypto expert Hays. Even in the digital world, ancient wisdom remains valid: It is not all gold that glitters.