Bitcoin Gold announced successful activation of hardfork, aimed at making it impossible to mine the cryptocurrency on powerful ASIC miners and centralize the network.

On 3 July, on block #536200, Bitcoin Gold switched to the new PoW algorithm, Equihash-BTG, which does not allow to mine the cryptocurrency on ASIC miners, but only on graphic cards. Thus, the network intends to withstand the centralization and concentration of computing power in the hands of large mining pools.

According to the developers, the new algorithm also comes with personalization that makes it harder to re-direct mining power through a “hashrate market,” which was used to carry out recent '51% attacks'.

The new protocol also includes a new difficulty adjustment algorithm, making the Bitcoin Gold blockchain system more susceptible to changes in hashing power. This allows to quickly stabilize the block time after the hash power has changed.

Mining pools and individual miners, as well as wallets and crypto exchanges have already updated their software to work on the new algorithm, the project reports.

The hardfork is an answer to new ASICs for Equihash cryptocurrency mining from Bitmain, Chinese producer of mining equipment.

In early May, a few hours after Bitmain announced sale of the new Antminer Z9 for Bitcoin Gold, Zcash and other cryptocurrencies on Equihash algorithm, a representative of Bitcoin Gold wrote about project's plan to hardfork.

"Just FYI as soon as Z9 goes to public, Bitcoin Gold will hardfork and make Z9 useless for mining $BTG. Bitcoin Gold will always be decentralised!" Martin Kuvandzhiev wrote a comment to the Bitmain tweet.