Study: the Bitcoin Private team has secretly removed the limit on the amount of coin supply

The data provider for the cryptorink Coinmetrics has published a report titled “Do not trust, verify: an example of Bitcoin Private”. It states that the developers quietly increased the maximum supply of this coin, violating the provisions of the whitepaper.

Bitcoin Private (BTCP) created as a result hardforka Bitcoin and ZClassic (fork Zcash). The coin supports evidence of the zk-SNARK zero disclosure and is thus endowed with a high degree of anonymity.

Initially, the volume of offers for Bitcoin Private is limited to 21 million coins, by analogy with Bitcoin. However, researchers at Coinmetrics found out that the developers of the “improved Bitcoin” retreated from the provisions of their main document .

“2.04 Bitcoin Private coins were hidden during the import of unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) of Bitcoin and sent to a secure pool of BTCP,” experts say.

BTCP protected pools contain coins corresponding to hidden addresses, which use Zk-snarks transaction anonymization technology. Such a “knight's move” allowed to increase the real limit of the offer of Bitcoin Private coins to 23.04 million.

Coinmetrics explains that in the process of hard forks Bitcoin Private and UXTO imports, BTCP produced “special blocks”. Each of them included 400 extra outlets with 50 coins.

In total, according to experts, 102 such blocks were released. Consequently, an additional 2,040,000 BTCPs were formed (102 “special units” × 400 outputs × 50 BTCP).

In the graph below, the blue line indicates the current BTCP proposal; Orange – predicted:

Data: CoinMetrics

What is the profit?

Then, the researchers note, these coins on April 29, 2018 were sent to protected addresses. A few months later, from July 11 to August 18, about 300 thousand BTCPs were launched onto the market.

The sale of these coins at market prices, they say in CoinMetrics, could bring Bitcoin Private to developers from $ 1-3 million. The remaining 1.74 million BTCP remain lying motionless on protected addresses.

Was it worth it?

The works of researchers, apparently, have shaken the course Bitcoin Private – for a day the coin has fallen in price by almost a quarter:

Data: CoinMarketCap

Many representatives of the cryptoindustry after reading the report CoinMetrics called the actions of the Bitcoin Private team fraud. For example, a well-known Twitter frequenter under the name @ArminVanBitcoin called this project a scam, as well as the other most famous forks of the first cryptocurrency:

Bitcoin XT was a scam!
Bitcoin Classic was a scam!
Bitcoin Unlimited was a scam!
…
Bitcoin Gold is a scam!
Bitcoin Private is a scam!
Bitcoin Cash is a scam!
Bitcoin SV is a scam!
…
Be it a scam! ? #Bitcoin

– A v B ⚡ (@ArminVanBitcoin) 24 breasts 2018 r.

Recall, recently, Coinmetrics analysts came to the conclusion that over the past six months, the Bitcoin network has shown extremely low activity.

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