Bitcoin Private is the lovechild of a fork-merge between Zclassic and Bitcoin. The coin was awarded to both Zclassic and Bitcoin holders in a 1 to 1 ratio. It was created with the idea to provide users with the ability to spend their coins in complete privacy all while enjoying faster blockchain infrastructure.
Consensus Algorithm
Bitcoin Private utilizes the Equihash Proof of Work consensus algorithm. This is done with the idea to make the network ASIC resistant, as ASIC hardware is significantly harder to obtain and has led to severe centralization of Bitcoin mining. GPUs and CPUs are more widely available, thus making the network more decentralized, preventing market manipulations and providing resistance to 51% attacks.
Enhanced Privacy
The Bitcoin Private network employs the use of the specialized, zero-knowledge zk-SNARKs algorithm. It relies on a construction where one side can prove possession of a piece of information without revealing that said information. It allows the prover and the verifier to confirm that a statement is true without revealing anything else than the validity of the statement itself.
Technical specification
The total supply is and always will be 21,000,000. It has a block time of 2.5 minutes as well as a block size of 2mb, making it much faster and scalable than the original Bitcoin. It’s also the only Bitcoin version to offer privacy features, as not even the latest Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold have those. Also, unlike its competitors, Bitcoin Private has a governance model.
There are many different opinions about Bitcoin Private in the crypto community. Many people accuse the project of being nothing more of a money-grab re-branded ZCL copy. It also isn’t the first privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, with competitors like Monero and Verge being much more ahead in terms of adaptation.
BTCP also severely lacks on marketing compared to those other two coins. It doesn’t end here, despite advertising itself as “secure”, the Bitcoin Private blockchain was subject to a 51% attack by ethical hacker Nick aka GeoCold, who live streamed the attack in order to prove how easy it was to perform.
Some people love BTCP and consider it a legit project, some hate it and dismiss it as a mere money-grab scam. Despite this, the BTCP network has active development and albeit its controversial beginnings, it may manage to establish itself on the privacy coin market.
The team needs to invest properly in marketing and actually make and attempt to get online marketplaces to use BTCP as a currency, until then, Bitcoin Private remains more a speculative asset than a cryptocurrency in the truest meaning of the word.
