It's still trading "futures" but the price is between $350 - $500 depending on the exchange. Coinmarketcap pegs it at $383 at time of writing, less than two hours from BTG going live.
So what is Bitcoin Gold?
Bitcoin Gold is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. At block 491407, Bitcoin Gold miners will begin creating blocks with a new proof-of-work algorithm, and this will cause a bifurcation of the Bitcoin blockchain. The original Bitcoin blockchain will continue on unaltered, but a new branch of the blockchain will split off from the original chain. The new branch is a distinct blockchain with the same transaction history as Bitcoin up until the fork, but then diverges from it. As a result of this process, a new cryptocurrency is born.
In a nutshell, it is a fork of Bitcoin where it has SegWit, but they changed the PoW algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash. They also made the difficulty adjustment for every block.
Here's a bit more from their website.
Bitcoin Gold decentralizes mining by adopting a PoW algorithm, Equihash, which cannot be run faster on the specialty equipment used for Bitcoin mining (ASIC miners.) This gives ordinary users a fair opportunity to mine with ubiquitous GPUs. For one thing, BTG won't be taking away hashing power from either BTC or BCH. That also means that ASIC powers-that-be won't be too keen on being involved in its development. Another coin that uses Equihash is ZEC/ZCash.
Hard forking Bitcoin’s blockchain fairly and efficiently distributes a new digital asset immediately to people all over the world who have interest in cryptocoins. Other methods, such as creating coins with a new genesis block, concentrate ownership within a small group. Well, I don't know about this. They did mine BTG after the fork and before giving everyone access to it.
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. This was one key issue with the Segwit2x fork, so they managed to implement it on their fork.
Bitcoin Gold adopts a difficulty adjustment algorithm called DigiShield V3. The idea behind it is to look at how much time has elapsed between the most recent block and the median of a set number of preceding blocks, and to adjust the difficulty every block to target a 10 minute block interval. This more responsive difficulty adjustment algorithm is extremely useful in protecting against big swings in the total amount of hash power. Such swings can result in extreme deviation from the normal 10 minute target block interval. Bitcoin Cash attempted to protect against this risk by implementing an “emergency difficulty adjustment” algorithm, but that had the catastrophic effect of causing sometimes 50 blocks to be mined in one hour, and other times more than 12 hours between two blocks.
Will Bitcoin Gold become a viable alt coin?
With Bitcoin Cash sudden bull market run, many are thinking they might hold on to their air-dropped BTG and see where it leads. Still, many believe that it's a scam coin and are planning on dumping theirs once the instructions for claiming come out. I prefer a wait-and-see stance on this matter. The hashing power and the market will decide whether this coin has value or not.
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