Cyber Attack wrecks the launch of Bitcoin Gold Cryptocurrency

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Bitcoin Gold launch was marred by a Cyber Attack which took place on the new crypto currency’s website. The digital currency was supposed to be launched on October 24th,2017, but came under sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber attack.

Bitcoin’s Gold website issued a public statement on Wednesday that its webpage experienced a DDOS attack yesterday with 10 million hits per minute, preventing legitimate users from accessing the site.

Technically, BTC Gold which is a split clone of Bitcoin was designed to make it easy for normal people to mine the online currency. But the launch had to be delayed by almost 9 hours which resulted in a slump in the ‘hard fork’ of the original bitcoin network.

Moreover, the attack impact was also felt by those who were into BTC trading, as the attack succeeded in influencing the current rate of Bitcoin against the dollar.

On Monday, one bitcoin was being sold for $5550 or £4,180. But due to the attack on Bitcoin Gold- a rival to BTC, the trading of the latter witnessed a downward slump on Wednesday.

Usually, mining bitcoins requires a lot of computing power which normal individuals cannot afford under usual circumstances. So, as of now, only a dozen of powerful computers and graphics processing units(GPUs) are able to mine bitcoin on a profit scale.

Bitcoin Gold is being introduced for normal people to participate in the mining of bitcoins in an effort to democratize the currency.
On Wednesday, Bitcoin Gold was trading at $150. At the most, the digital currency might reach the mark of $200 by this month end, as not many are showing faith in the newly created currency.

Note 1- In the world of Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin mining means book-keeping of digital transactions. So, when someone mines, they receive a digital payment for their efforts.

Note 2- Hard Fork is related to blockchain technology and it simply means a radical change to a protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid or vice versa. But this needs all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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