Investing.com – Bitcoin rose on Thursday, as the popular digital currency attempted to test its recent all-time highs while Ethereum struggled to hold onto gains.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $5,950, up $225, or 3.94% just shy of recent all-time high of $6,190.
Upside momentum in bitcoin resumed as traders continued to pile into the digital currency, shrugging off the recent fork in its blockchain, leading to the creation of a new rival cryptocurrency called bitcoin gold.
Proponents of bitcoin gold argue that the newly minted cryptocurrency will decentralize the Bitcoin network, which has become crowded by a handful of miners - users who help maintain the system by validating transactions on the network - using expensive computer hardware called application-specific integrated circuits.
“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, computer chip cards capable of mining bitcoin 50 times faster than traditional video graphics cards – and are considerably more expensive – has led to a concentration of bitcoin miners.
The top six mining pools by global processing power are Chinese, make up more than two-thirds of computational power or hashrate on the bitcoin network, according to blockchain.info.
In the other crypto trade, bitcoin cash rose 2.05% to $335.10 while Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, added 0.01% to $295.28.