Bitcoin Private, a first of its kind “fork-merge” of Bitcoin and Zclassic

What is Bitcoin Private?

“The “Right to Privacy” is a crowning liberty in the free world, and is essential to the principles set forth by Satoshi and the cryptocurrency community. Financial privacy is a critical principle in Satoshi’s vision of a new digital currency world, however, many people are still stuck at crossroads with pseudo-anonymous transactions on blockchains. Furthermore, there are government and private sector organizations that leverage massive datasets and machine learning to identify the individuals associated with such a transaction.” ~BTC Private whitepaper

As Bitcoin’s blockchain grew over the years, it’s fixed, small block size and slow block times caused issues with fees and a backlog of transactions to be processed. In addition, the advent of ASIC mining hardware has further led to a pseudo-centralization of the network including the potential to de-anonymize portions of the network.

Bitcoin Private (BTCP) is a first of its kind “fork-merge” of Bitcoin (BTC) and Zclassic (ZCL). The goal was to combine the baked-in privacy features from Zclassic with the resilience, security and market awareness of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Private was issued using a 1:1 airdrop (1 BTCP per ZCL and BTC) which took place on February 28, 2018. This has led to most of the circulating coin supply distributed among early BTC and ZCL holders.

Bitcoin Private Specifications

Circulating coin supply: 20.3 million

Total coin supply: 21 million

Block reward: 1.5625 BTCP

Block time: 2.5 min

Block size: 2 MB

Halving schedule: 210,000 blocks

Mining algorithm: Equihash

Privacy protocol: zk-SNARKs

To remedy the uneven distribution, Bitcoin Private opted to use a larger block size (2 MB), shorter block time (2.5 min), and a GPU-friendly proof of work algorithm for mining (Equihash). Ultimately, the Bitcoin Private chain aims to create lower fees than Bitcoin as well as transaction speeds that are four to six times faster.

“Bitcoin Private is an amalgamation of two transaction systems – transparent and shielded transactions. Transparent transactions operate on the same principles as Bitcoin – input, output, amount, and signature. Sources of all funds, destinations, and amounts are stored transparently on the blockchain. Shielded transactions, conversely, encrypt these details into a special section of a block called the JoinSplit. These transactions are verifiable but indecipherable to third-party observers.” ~Bitcoin Private Whitepaper

Bitcoin Private Team

Bitcoin Private was originally proposed on Twitter by Rhett Creighton, founder of Zclassic. Since then, others came into the fold including Jacob Brutman, Ph.D, Giuseppe Stuto, Jon Layton, Christopher Sulmone, and Geoff Hopkins who helped author the Bitcoin Private whitepaper. The Bitcoin private team now includes over 200 contributors and 20 engineers.

Bitcoin Private Voluntary Miner Contribution Plan

The team set up a pre-fork ZCL multi-sig wallet with 50,000 Zclassic to be forked into BTCP to create a treasury for development and marketing of Bitcoin Private by the community.

In order to help fund development, the Bitcoin Private team put together a plan where miners could voluntarily choose to donate funds in exchange for incentivized early mining access to Bitcoin Private.

Fund use is broken down as follows:

• 50% – Exchange listings
• 25% – Development budget
• 15% – Marketing
• 10% – General, administrative costs

Roadmap and Accomplishments

Zooming along development wise, Bitcoin Private has been crushing milestones and getting mainstream media coverage.

From exchanges to wallets, payment gateways and marketing support, Bitcoin Private has ambitious future goals but also has impressive accomplishments to date.

Bitcoin Private Merchant Platform Phase 1

The accomplishments include:

• Vendor and payment gateway partnerships – Due to overwhelming vendor interest, the team has sped up their plan and will launch phase one on April 13th.
• Exchanges listings – HitBTC has confirmed listing BTCP with talks and submissions made to Binance and Kucoin. They are also listed on the BarterDEX by Komodo.
• Marketing, Support, and Public Relations – BTCP has created an ambassador program and currently have over 17 countries represented. They’re also increasing customer service and advertising efforts.
• Official wallets and payment solutions – The team has submitted a pull request to the Trezor team for review and is in the process of integrating Ledger wallets. Development for an iOS electrum wallet and copay solution including a chrome extension is progressing.

💙Hi Ambassadors! If anyone has a company or knows of a company that can/will accept BTCP as a form of payment DM PLZ!! 💙 Check out @sunnyvin‘s Nakheel Jewellers and Nilesh Jewellers UAE/Dubai and Sharjah 😍😍😍 that sticker tho🔥🔥🔥 💙 #BitcoinPrivate #BTCP $BTCP 💙 pic.twitter.com/hox9nXwQpn

— BitcoinPrivate Ambassadors (@btcp_ambassador) March 18, 2018

Critiques and Challenges

Zclassic, Bitcoin Private’s predecessor, has a sketchy past embroiled in controversy. This included wallet functionality problems, wild price action, failed issuing of airdrop tokens, and potentially illegal insider trading on Bittrex.  This has rubbed holders the wrong way.

To this day, some people have not received their Zclassic deposits by exchanges like Cryptopia. Although Bitcoin Private is a completely new project with mostly new contributors, this previous history still haunts the project.

Where to buy Bitcoin Private

Since this coin is brand-spankin’ new, there is only one solid place to buy these coins, Trade Satoshi. It’s also available on Nanex but with much less volume.

Where to mine Bitcoin Private

Equihash is a popular algorithm for GPU mining which is what Bitcoin Private is based on. There is a developer built and maintained pool as well as sponsored and verified mining pools.

Where to store Bitcoin Private

There are a variety of wallets for Bitcoin Private including an Electrum and Full node wallet for Windows, Linux, and Mac. In addition, there’s a paper wallet and an iOS mobile client.

Final Thoughts

Bitcoin Private has a lot going for it. Using the Bitcoin name, developer community, Zclassic privacy tech, and a decentralization ethos, BTCP is a new yet original blockchain combination. The “fork merge” is the first of its kind so on a technical experiment level, it’s pretty cool.

We caught up with a Bitcoin Private team member who shared their take on the project:

“We want this to be a long-term used technology. We plan on delivering on both the product strategy front and the actual end user traction/adoption front. We’re big believers in letting the traction speak for itself. We’re going to be continuing to work hard toward this mission and we’re just going to prove ourselves that way. People can see if they agree with this or not and see that we’re a real team. We’re going to let that define it.” Giuseppe Stuto, Bitcoin Private Marketing Director

One big critique is how the airdrop favored ZCL and BTC whales with 20.3 million out of 21 million BTCP already in circulation. This isn’t very decentralized, despite this ethos being promoted.

Although a volatile, controversial past from Zclassic has cast doubt in many users minds’, there has been support and enthusiasm for Bitcoin Private from newcomers and OGs alike. This, along with the rapid development and concrete milestones hit, bodes well thus far.

So for now, let’s see what happens!

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