Bitcoin Private (BTCP): Fork it Friday!
BTCP, better known as Bitcoin Private, can be defined as a fork-merge between Bitcoin and ZClassic. The Bitcoin Fork block was #511346 and the ZClassic Fork block was #272991. What is so interesting about this is the fact that two forks essentially came together and created this new cryptocurrency!
Bitcoin Private: Origins
Bitcoin Private found its origins in the everlasting debate over user’s having to compromise their privacy to gain access to digital services on the internet. In centralized systems, this surrender of your private information will often times leave your accounts vulnerable to attack by malicious third parties. We have seen this time and time again with banks and digital services today. If it is online, there is always someone who can find a way to break into it. This has lead to a lack of trust between middle men and end users.
BTCP sought to create a better system for handling transactions securely where a centralized middle man would not be needed, and transactions can be anonymized to the point where they are untraceable entirely (something Bitcoin is currently lacking). On top of this, BTCP rose up out of the ashes of Bitcoin’s crushing and impractical fees that the network was exposed to when its capacity had been reached. BTCP is a low-fee, fast and private transactional network that the team considers to be a fulfillment of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true vision!
Anonymity in BTCP works through a privacy protocol called zk-Snarks, which had its origins in ZClassic. zk-Snarks has the ability to perform shielded transactions, which are private and harder for third-parties to trace. Right now there are companies out their solely dedicated to tracking Bitcoin users with machine learning algorithms and other technology, so Bitcoin has essentially been exposed as not being as private as it could be. Bitcoin can too easily be compromised due to TOR network nodes and the concept of obfuscation (purposely making something hard to understand).
On top of this, Bitcoin Private sought to address the glaring problems that Bitcoin was regularly facing (small block size, high fees, slow block times, long difficulty adjustments, ASIC miner centralization, etc). Because of the lack of progress and minimal changes made to address these issues, forks would keep happening off of the Bitcoin blockchain, even though none of them have managed to overtake Bitcoin yet.
BTCP and EQUIHASH
So Bitcoin Private worked on fixing these issues by first off changing the Proof of Work to EQUIHASH in an effort to reduce centralization by ASIC Miners (Currently it is believed that almost 60% of all Bitcoin mining is occuring in China, so its not good for decentralization). With EQUIHASH, cryptocurrency mining can be more democratized and quickly verifiable, though it is a memory-intensive algorithm.
To conclude, Bitcoin Private is a great project with an awesome team of developers backing it up. In a world where we are seeing the original champions of decentralization get chopped and screwed by ASIC miners and big players; A more democratized system is certainly welcome, and BTCP is just one solution to this problem.