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.'
Spendcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency that powers the Spend.com ecosystem of products. Spend has two financial services products, the Spend App and Spend Card, which are products of Spend.com that give our users a multi-currency digital wallet that they are able to store fiat and digital assets/currencies. They will be able to buy, sell, store, manage, and exchange all supported currencies within the app. The Spend App is available on iOS, Android, or Web based devices. The Spend prepaid debit card allows users to send fiat based currencies loaded onto it via the Spend App anywhere that accepts MasterCard. Spend Foundation is also launching a decentralized educational platform called Blockchain University (bu.org). Blockchain University is designed to run off our open-source blockchain called Cross Ledger which incorporates a hybrid delegated proof-of-stake consensus model called Proof-of-Support. Proof-of-Support creates a learning based ecosystem that rewards those users who support and answer the knowledge base and Quora style system. Spendcoin will be the native digital currency powering the platform. Blockchain University and Cross Ledger are planned to launch in 2019.