Investing.com – Bitcoin fell on Monday, deepening its retreat from record highs after surging above $6,100 to fresh record highs over the weekend.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin fell to $5,839, down $141.5, or 2.37%.
Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $6,190 on Saturday a day after surging above the $6,000 for the first time in its history which followed a spike in trading volumes to $2.11 billion, as traders piled into the cryptocurrency in order to benefit from the upcoming split or so-called hard fork in Bitcoin.
The hard fork of bitcoin’s blockchain will create an offshoot cryptocurrency called bitcoin gold, which would be freely distributed to current holders of bitcoin, strengthening the appeal of holding the popular digital currency.
Led by Jack Liao, CEO of Hong Kong mining firm LightningASIC, bitcoin gold is slated to launch on October 25, with its cryptocurrency rumored to be available on exchanges in early November.
The expected hard fork in Bitcoin comes amid concerns over mining monopolies present in the Bitcoin network. Proponents of Bitcoin Gold believe that the application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) resistant cryptocurrency will decentralize the Bitcoin network, lowering the possibility of mining monopolies.
“Bitcoin Gold is the brainchild of Jack Liao and is launching as a hard fork of Bitcoin”, said prominent Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song. “The idea [of Bitcoin gold] is to give mining back to the users who can start using CPUs and GPUs to mine.”
The rapid adoption of application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, expensive computer chip cards capable of mining bitcoin 50 times faster than traditional video graphics cards has led to a concentration of bitcoin miners.
The top six mining pools by global processing power are Chinese, making up more than two-thirds of computational power or hashrate on the bitcoin network, according to blockchain.info.
In other cryptocurrency news, Bitcoin Cash fell 4.43% to $310.74. Bitcoin Cash’s market cap of $5.27 billion pales in comparison to bitcoin’s $97.31 billion.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, fell 3.85% to $282.35.