Bitcoin price: Cryptocurrency plummets $1000 ahead of bitcoin gold split

BITCOIN prices took a blow today, falling below £5,328.46 ($7,000) just days before a planned software update will release bitcoin gold.
Bictoin prices fell by £761.21 ($1,000) in just over 48 hours after strong performance at the start of the week.

The crypto token opened today at £5,440.19 ($7,146.78), according to CoinDesk, before peaking at £5,579.71 ($7,330.06).

On Wednesday, the popular digital currency flared to an unprecedented price of more than £5,937.43 ($7,800) in the wake of the cancelled Segwit2x update.

The plummeting price comes on top of a hard fork that took place a few weeks ago, and will now come into effect with a new token known as bitcoin gold (BTG).
BTG aims to keep most properties of the bitcoin protocol, but will disallow the use of specialised chipsets in the mining process.
Bitcoin gold is now scheduled to arrive at 7pm GMT on Sunday November 12 – not November 1, as it was originally planned.

The token's backers said in a statement: "We are extremely grateful for the community around the world who have been contributing hash power to our testnets; besides patiently testing their own mining process, they allow exchanges, pools, wallet developers, and all other service operators to implement and test their support of BTG so that the bitcoin gold community can have a full suite of services at launch time."

In a similar split to bitcoin cash earlier in August, all current users of the cryptocurrency will be credited with a number of BTG tokens equal to their bitcoin stash.
In the few months that is has been alive, bitcoin cash has already managed to amount a market cap volume of £10,546,618,870.19 ($13,855,093,020).

But the creators of bitcoin gold have faced criticism, mostly for choosing to withhold one per cent of the currency's volume.

Unlike bitcoin, the new token was created in advance of being open-sourced to the public.

BTG's creators have argued that this move simply aims to pay the development team for their work.

Users will be able to redeem their coins after the cryptocurrency is launched.
Some have also criticised the need for a bitcoin derivative in market already over-saturated by crypto tokens.

Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, said in an statement: "These forks are very bad for bitcoin.

"Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins — since you can always fork it and double the supply."

There are currently more than 1,200 different tokens in existence according to CoinMarketCap. Most of them do not even reach a tenth of a dollar in price.