Everyone who owns bitcoin will receive bitcoin gold. This is being issued at the rate of 1 bitcoin gold to bitcoin. Since bitcoin gold was issued, its price has plunged over 66 percent, trading at just over $161 per coin, according to Coinmarketcap data.
It appears the sell-off was due to investors dumping the cryptocurrency, perhaps signaling a lack of faith in the newly-created coin.
Bitcoin also fell sharply Wednesday before recovering and other cryptocurrencies like ethereum took a hit too.
Bitcoin gold has faced teething problems in the few hours it has been around. The website for the new cryptocurrency suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack, which is when a server is overloaded with requests.
And many major cryptocurrency exchanges have not begun trading in bitcoin gold yet.