Bitcoin Gold hopes to change the paradigm around mining on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to the founders, the Bitcoin blockchain has become too centralized. Large companies with huge banks of mining computers now mine the vast majority of Bitcoin. For the founders of Bitcoin Gold, having large companies control the Bitcoin network defeats the purpose of a decentralized ledger and peer-to-peer currencies. In response, they’ve initialized the Bitcoin Gold project. It’s an alternate fork of the Bitcoin blockchain that implements changes that make mining more equitable. The goal of Bitcoin Gold is to create a network where anyone can become a miner with only basic hardware. As a result, Bitcoin Gold mining would be spread among many miners, instead of a few large companies.There have several features such as decentralization. Bitcoin Gold decentralizes mining by adopting a PoW algorithm, Equihash-BTG, which cannot be run on the specialty equipment used for Bitcoin mining (ASIC miners.) This gives ordinary users a fair opportunity to mine with common GPUs. Besides, there have fair distribution. Hard forking Bitcoin’s blockchain fairly and efficiently distributes 16.5 million BTG immediately to people all over the world who have interest in cryptos. Other methods, such as creating coins with a new genesis block, concentrate ownership within a small group. There also have a replay protection. To ensure the safety of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin Gold has implemented full replay protection and unique wallet addresses, essential features that protect users and their coins from several kinds of accidents and malicious threats. Most new mineable cryptocurrencies involve ASIC-resistant hashing algorithms, and it’s becoming something of an industry standard to promote decentralization. In that respect, Bitcoin Gold holds a lot to be excited about. At its core, it’s about transitioning the Bitcoin network to more decentralized mining. However, as we saw above, there’s not much evidence that the current Bitcoin mining system is broken. There have been some small complaints, and it’s not ideal that the network is so centralized. Nevertheless, miners on Bitcoin have a lot to lose if they wield their power too aggressively. There are also new entrants to the Bitcoin mining community that are decentralizing control from a few key ASIC farms. The general consensus from Bitcoin experts is there’s not enough new in Bitcoin Gold to warrant an independent investment. While it certainly doesn’t hurt to hold onto your free BTG that you receive as a result of the fork (if you owned Bitcoin before Oct 24), wait until the dust settles before deciding whether to buy more.'
Solarcoin is a Scrypt based alternative digital currency and its innovation comes from the secondary proof of work reward: the Solar Proof of Work. Green solar energy producers are entitled to receive one SLR for every MWh electricity generated. In order to claim a Solar Proof of Work reward, solar plant owners must submit 3rd party verified energy generation certificates such as a Solar Renewable Energy Certificate (SREC) or equivalent country specific documentation. All Solar Proof Of Work rewards will be stored as transactions in the blockchain. The supply of SLR comprises of the following: - The Mining Pool: 105 million Solarcoins (0.1%) to be publicly mined over the next 40 years. All publicly mined Solarcoins represent historically generated and unclaimed solar electricity. - The Generator Pool: 97.5 billion SolarCoins (99.4%) are currently stored in the OCA non-circulating generation pool account. These will be exchanged for Solar Proof of Work claims of solar electricity generation submitted over the next 40 years at the rate of 1 SLR per MWh of solar energy. - The Genesis Pool: 500 million Solarcoins (0.5%) are stored in the genesis pool account for environmental charities, early volunteers, advisers, builders and maintainers of SolarCoin infrastructure. Genesis pool circulation is capped so that it will never represent more than 5% of total Solarcoin in circulation.