Bitcoin Private

History:

The best way to tell Bitcoin Private history is to start from its roots to ZClassic.

ZClassic was founded by Rhett Creighton as a fork from ZCash on November 6, 2016, within only one week after the ZCash launch. ZCash shook the world by introducing the nouvelle protocol zk-SNARKs or Zero-Knowledge Succint Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. That's a mouth full.

Rhett Creighton

For those who've never heard of zk-SNARKS, I'll try my best to simplify a highly complex mathematical concepts.

Zero-knowledge proofs means that two parties can conduct a transaction, share information, verify the information is accurate, all without revealing the information or transaction itself.

In practical terms, it means that you can do a completely untraceable transactions without leaking any information about it (metadata), the only thing that will show up on the ledger is the proof of the transaction. There is not information about the sender or receiver or the amounts. That is crazy!

Anyway going back to the topic, along with this revolutionary tech, ZCash introduced a 20% founders reward, which means that from every block mined, 20% will go to a founders reward address. There was a bit of controversy within the ZCash community.

The main issue the community had wasn't specifically about the 20% taxation, although in my opinion the ZCash taxation is too high. The controversy was due the fact that the ZCash Electric Coin Company had a closed private round of funding, and as a result private investors will benefit from the founders reward as well as from the value of any other product that the Zcash Company may create. Everything happened behind closed doors. So here we are, a successful project, in which we have a handful of investors, receiving a cut, for basically doing nothing. That's my view on it, it may be envy, I would loved to be one of those investors.

On a serious note, I’m a firm believer that any project that has a taxation on miners and want to represent themselves as a currency, everything has to be transparent.

ZCash was not transparent.

Enough about opinions. Going back to the story, after the ZCash community uproar on the Bitcointalk forums, Rhett Creighton decided to take matters into his own hands, and fork ZCash removing the 20% founders reward by only erasing five lines of code, and just like that, ZClassic was born. A cohesive community rallied behind it.

ZClassic on its infancy was truly a community project. Rhett departed shortly after the fork, and the community took over the project, months passed and it was clear to the community that the ZClassic volunteering model had its shortcomings, with the ambition of taking the project to other heights and lead by prominent figures within the community, arose the idea of starting a new project, reintroducing a transparent funding model and a ambitious roadmap, and ZenCash was born, forking from ZClassic, and taking most of its community along with the strong ideological grassroots approach, that made everyone rally behind ZClassic.

Unfortunately for ZClassic, this was the beginning of the end, the community also migrated to ZenCash and the project stayed abandoned all the way through pretty much of 2017, making it new lows every month, and seeing a continuous drop of it's hashrate.

Fast forward to December 2017, ZClassic is trading at all time low relative to BTC 10k satoshis, no Dev's, no Community, no block explorers, unofficially a dead project.

Suddenly the ZClassic twitter came alive, and Rhett announced to the world:

After what seemed like an introspection & brainstorming period. The Idea of Bitcoin Private was introduced.

So what is Bitcoin Private?

Bitcoin Private is a somewhat unique fork. Both ZClassic ZCL and Bitcoin BTC were co-forked into Bitcoin Private (BTCP). So existing stakeholders from ZClassic and Bitcoin got credited with BTCP.

A new community rapidly formed this time with different ideals and objectives, ZClassic just had went through several months of stagnation and abandonment, and at the same time it was being accumulated at a all time low, looking into retrospect it was the perfect scenario, to revitalize the project, in the midst of the end of the biggest bull run that Crypto had ever seen and hysteria was rampant!

Crypto Twitter & YouTubers made their move and started rallying behind Crypto's favorite game, (Pump n' Dump), Bitcoin Private was being heavily promoted, with the promise of creating billions of dollars of value out of thin air without really introducing any new feature or anything really innovative. The price went from 5$ to $225 ! 45x gain in just 3 weeks.

It never ceases to amaze me how rapid the Crypto industry moves, not only the price skyrocketed but the team grew from a two-team person in December to supposedly over 30 members in just under one month!

Despite the monumental price increase, BTCP team created a ZCL donation pool, rewarding the miners with extra BTCP when the hard fork took place. With this move, the team managed to get over 1M USD in donation funds.

The fork was executed with some minor hiccups and delays. That leads us to the present day, there was a lot of expectations regarding exchange support, which clearly wasn´t met post fork, BTCP initially only traded on Trade Satoshi, which in turn reflected on the price, to be fair, it was also partially due to the whole market conjuncture.

Let's see what the future holds for this Bitcoin fork.

TEAM:

The team was composed in 30 days. I’ll give the team the benefit of the doubt and won't give my personal opinion about them. The project is too recent and it's hard to tell how involved the team members truly are. It's a big question mark, at this point.

I will say it was an interesting choice or Rhett to partner with @movrcx Joshua Yabut, who had engaged in nefarious and questionable activities on ZenCash.

TECH:

Proof of work: Equihash algorithm (GPU mining)
zk-SNARKS - Private transactions with hidden sender/receiver information
Total Supply: 21,000,000
Circulating Supply: 20,311,925

ROADMAP:

There's not much information regarding the roadmap, besides additional exchange support, and wallet fixes. The BTCP white paper briefly mentions the possibility of adding Dandelion obfuscation, but it’s not concrete.

Most of the focus revolves around how to address a major vector of attack due to low hashrate.

All other suggestions revolve around how to deal with the fact of having such a small amount of supply left to be mined. Which in turn could represent a major vector of attack due low hashrate.

FUTURE:

With the Bitcoin Fork mania cooling down and the lack of support from quality exchanges, and with no innovative tech to show, things are looking grim for BTCP, it's up to the team to step up and show it's worth in the near future.