I just wanted to mention a very interesting open source development project in case any of the developers reading this site would want to get involved with an open source crypto currency / block chain project.

Bitcoin Private is a crypto currency coin in the “privacy” segment with a very interesting road map. The currently running code is based on a coin called Zclassic (which in turn is based on a coin called Zcash which in turn is based on an ancient version of Bitcoin). The key feature of these coins is called zkSNARKs (zero knowledge) which long story short makes financial transactions completely hidden. The main development effort of Bitcoin Private ATM is to “re-base” by bringing zkSNARKs to the very latest Bitcoin v0.16 code base. AFAIK it’s nearly done and a testnet will soon be set up. Then many other features will be added, like “Dandelion” which is a set of obfuscation features similar to those that other (non-zkSNARKs) privacy coins use. In the end, Bitcoin Private will combine all key features of coins like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Zcash, Monero, Dash, Verge etc into one single, totally unique “super-coin”.

The whitepaper with background information is found here: https://btcprivate.org/whitepaper.pdf

Github of the re-base: https://github.com/btcprivate/btcp-rebase
Normal github: https://github.com/BTCPrivate/BitcoinPrivate/

Developers, miners, users, traders, etc and discussion forums can be found on Discord: https://discord.gg/46U2p4m

Website (long overdue updating): https://btcprivate.org

Regardless of how credible the rest of the project may be, the choice of name reeks of a shady scam.

I'm not sure I trust Bitcoin itself, although I have used it as a transfer medium to fund a couple of purchases.

Somehow, Open Source Developer project and Cryptocurrency don't seem like two terms that add up when combined.

No doubt by the time I feel comfortable with the type of transaction, it will already be common place.

Hopefully the next chapter in the Fall of the Empire won't be written "It was bad when they first substituted currency backed with securities, then left the paper money to float without support, but their real downfall was replacing the currency traded electronically with just software"

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You mean the "Bitcoin" part or the "Private" part? It's in the eye of the beholder I suppose.

It's a very serious project BTW...

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The thing is it does!

And the fact that completely open source projects (where everyone can see, peek and poke the guts of it) actually works in a concept like this, is a proof of the strength of the concept of crypto currencies.

All this is very interesting. I am relatively new to crypto currency myself (since around January) but the technology and possibilities with block chains are fascinating!

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Hijacking the established and widely known Bitcoin name with the obvious motive of profiteering off the name of an essentially unrelated project due to deliberately manufactured consumer confusion is morally bankrupt behaviour.

Trademarked names are the achilles heel of community-owned open source projects as you cannot effectively protect names without having them registered by a legal entitity and without the resources to engage in legal disputes as necessary. Exploiting this weakness is a cut-throat business move that is simply shady.

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Not with a name like that. Sorry.

The euphemistic view is that the project leads may be technical geniuses but lack the business savvy to understand the implications of their choice of name. Personally, I happen to think they know exactly what they are doing and I, for one, would never support this project in any way unless they changed the name, which I am sure is unlikely.

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BTCP was probably the ugliest fork I've seen. It forked from Zclassic, which dropped like 98% overnight. Zclassic at least had major exchange listings, which BTCP does not to this day (at least check). The corpse of ZCL is being raised from the dead once again for another hard fork in the coming months with "Anonymous Bitcon". I'm growing increasingly leery of all these forks.

On cryptocurrency itself. Original Bitcoin is not going anywhere. I have problems with the Bitcoin Core team, but it seems the market is speaking on what will remain top dog. During this consolidation period all of the Altcoins are suffering much worse than Bitcoin.

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All that needs to be know bout any "coins".

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TL;DR follows:

It's called "forking" and is quite common and not really any more "highjacking" than releasing your own Linux distro and calling it "Linux [something]" with your own special touch and twist to it.

Bitcoin has grown into an handicapped blob from a coin perspective, it's merely a high-volatile and high-risk trading object since a year or two, and it's quite unusable as actual means of payments. A transaction can take an afternoon and the fees are ridiculous for small payments.

As a result, forks emerges that tries to fix various things. Bitcoin Cash for example tried to solve transaction speed by increasing block sizes. Bitcoin Gold tried to re-introduce decentralization by making GPU-mining possible again. Others use masternodes, etc.

Sometimes the new coins can be considered a fully functional "test-nets" for new technology that are later introduced into the Bitcoin core base, like Litecoin was the first active coin that had the lightning-network active. Atomic Swaps. I know of at least one Bitcoin Private developer who consider Bitcoin Private to be such a pioneer for zk-SNARKs encryption in a Bitcoin context, and perhaps even Dandelion as well. But the point is that Bitcoin Private is the first one adding real privacy in an up-to-date Bitcoin context in practice. It's nothing corporate, it's fully decentralized and open source, and just like no-one in the Linux sphere is losing anything if a new distro with special features is released, no-one in Bitcoin sphere is losing anything because of Bitcoin Private (or other forks).

Agreeably, there has been a great number of fortune-seekers trying to profiteer on the "Bitcoin" name during the last year's Bitcoin bull-run. I would like to name "Bitcoin Cash" as the biggest one (and the most successful one in the profiteering business as well). Essentially, its "developers" simply changed some parameters that increased the block size, which is a completely worthless "addition" (Bitcoin originally had unlimited block sizes and introduced at some point a 1MB limit for security reason, changing this threshold is a no-brainer). Bitcoin Cash added nothing, and has no real reason to exist.

Bitcoin Private however is a *development project*, with a long-term horizon. Its development road map spans over a full year, unlike Bitcoin Cash's (and similar) 5 minutes. And it aims to solve one of Bitcoin's most serious problems: the fact that every single transaction, from the coin's birth until now, all senders, all receivers and all amounts, are perfectly visible in the block chain. Forever. Now and in the future. This was not a problem in the beginning of Bitcoin (whose original goals (one of them) were anonymous transactions) but since then a lot of data-analysis tools has emerged that are used to detect, monitor and analyze data streams in social media, and they have proven to be very effective in interpreting the Bitcoin block chain. Bitcoin is not anonymous at all. Rather the opposite actually. More tools will emerge and being refined in a close future, including new and current AI, that will have a go at the Bitcoin block chain that is being kept completely open.

The "Zero Knowledge" zk-SNARKs is an extremely clever concept. It allows for completely anonymous transactions (sender, receiver and amounts) in a block-chain. This tech was once the foundation for the coin Zcash. Which was later forked into Zclassic (Zcash minus the 20% "founders tax"). Which in turn was forked into ZenCash and the initial/*current* pre-rebase version Bitcoin Private.

What the Bitcoin Private re-base is about though, is to port the zk-SNARKs technology into the latest Bitcoin v0.16 codebase and eco-system. This is very important, a real, tangible and unique contribution to the entire Bitcoin world. The second aim of Bitcoin Private is to incorporate the prototype Bitcoin "Dandelion" concept in a live context for the first time. The two most important concepts of crypto-currency privacy, combined. And a Tor layer. Decentralized GPU-mined PoW (instead of grossly centralized Bitcoin), 2.5 minutes block time (instead of Bitcoin's 10 minutes) with mining difficulty adjusted every block (instead of Bitcoin's 2 weeks) and 2MB block size (instead of Bitcoin's 1MB). Etc. And to build a merchant system around it to make it possible to use the coin as an actual means of payment, unlike current Bitcoin Core (yes, that is their own name, reflecting the "Core" of Bitcoin in the Open Source world of many forks). The first version of the merchant system (with an ambitious road map to lead it further) has been released live. The Bitcoin Private coin is supported by *both* major Hardware Wallet brands, which is quite unique for a new coin. ATM support. There is a system for SMS-payments. Etc. Etc. Etc. Serious development everywhere. Not a 5-minute fork.

Gentoo Linux is different from Yellow Dog Linux is different from Debian Linux is different from Slackware Linux. All open source, in the same Linux world. They are all Linux. Developers of one contributes in a way to the development of others.

It's the same thing here really.

[ Edited by takemehomegrandma 10.08.2018 - 23:54 ]

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You are speaking from a (disappointed?) investor's perspective in a generally crashing environment. I am however speaking about technology. Two different perspectives that are commonly mixed up and confused.

But since you mention "Anonymous Bitcoin", that's a scam if you ask me. People behind it are kind of known to have lost a lot of ZCL-money post BTCP fork since they didn't understand the coin would drop like a stone. They are now trying to pump ZCL in the name of "Anonymous Bitcoin Fork" so that they can drop their bags onto someone else.

The developers of Bitcoin Private were the ones who resurrected the long-dead Zclassic coin, updated and bugfixed its core, wallets and network. Brought the Electrum wallet to it. All this as a base for the initial Bitcoin Private fork. Since then, the coin is re-basing to the proper Bitcoin v0.16 instead. Going "Bitcoin" for real (unlike Zclassic). This is what my original post was about.

I have seen videos from "Anonymous Bitcoin" folks. In all of them, the code that is shown on "developers" computer screens is early Bitcoin Private code based on Zclassic. Good luck to them in their bear-market re-branding effort.


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Nothing is replacing Bitcoin as an investment instrument. But it's completely dysfunctional as a currency. Two separate things IMHO. Bitcoin Private is building infrastructure to function as money, for payments. That's the ambition, where a lot of efforts are invested. Real-life utility, coming from the fact that *it doesn't* have Bitcoin's ridiculously open block chain, while actually being based on the latest top-notch Bitcoin technology, having easy access to its entire eco-system.

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The classic textbook example of investment bubbles, but kind of misguided as an example of currency for payments.

Dollars and Euros are actually the coins that "mystically" appears (by banks issuing digital loans for security).

Crypto currencies on the other hand, are often (but not always) based upon Proof of Work, and they often (but not always) have a finite amount of coins available. This in absolute contrast to Fiat currencies like Dollars or Euros.

The Bitcoin system can for example only have 21 million coins available. There won't *ever* be more. Bitcoin currently has 17 201 950 of them mined. Bitcoin Private however has (because of its co-fork with Zclassic and Bitcoin) 20 512 278 coins mined, which in practice means it is the (by far) furthermost "evolved" Bitcoin block chain, with the currently lowest possible internal inflation of all Bitcoin flavors. The relative "value" of it (in relation to other currencies, including Dollars or Euros) will depend on adoption as a mean of payment. This is when (if!) it will turn from gambling into currency for real. And indeed this is much unbroken territory. Who knows what will happen. But acceptance of crypto-currencies as means of payments are growing quite rapidly. In a micro economy logic where supply of a good is finite and limited to only 21 million units, an increasing demand of it can only mean one thing for its relative price.

What I think is the driving force in crypto-curreny development is:

1) Ideology: To create a free monetary system and economy that is in the hand of "the people" and is disconnected from influence of national states and politics. No Tulips here!
2) Technology: To actually develop ways to make this happen! (This is what my original post is about) No Tulips here!
3) Speculation/investment: There are always people trading and speculating in currencies relative value to each other. In this context there are *definitely* Tulips. High risk equal to high potential gains. Time will eventually cancel this out though, in whatever direction.



[ Edited by takemehomegrandma 10.08.2018 - 23:58 ]

I don't see a Problem with the Name.

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Which sounds like a good idea, but really is a bad one.

Cos if Bitcoin ever got adapted as payment to some degree it would have deflation written into it's genes.

Deflation in a consumer spending based economy is pure poison as it will lead to hoarding and delaying spending, both will even more decrease the amount of Bitcoin in circulation.

Actually that kinda already happened.

At 1st it was just a novel way to waste CPU cycles (just like SETI or DNETC) and at one point if became a possible to order a pizza or suchlike with it.
When that spread, demand for Coins grow and in came the speculators.

Right now no one offers anything for BT, shops may offer to pay xxx $/€ via Bitcoin, but that something completely different.

In order for any crypto to really take over as money it would need to be able to adapt the number of coins to how widely it is used.

The only positive aspect of bitcoin so far is that it's filled ebay with cheap high end ex-miner graphics cards. Sure, they've run the absolute shit out of their GPUs so they probably won't last long, but never look a gift horse...

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It might be offset somewhat by the fewer power on/off cycles these cards will have experienced.

There is a $7,500 bounty to be picked up here:

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/62951801-fully-working-wallet-daemon-and-client-7-500-bounty

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For currency I'm leaning towards Digibyte. It is impossible to have a 51% Attack. DGB has 40 times the confirmations of BTC and that should improve further.

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I am sorry but this is nonsense, and I know you are smarter than this.

First of all, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux and Fedora Linux, just to name three, all use the official Linux-branded kernel. What their maintainers did not do is take a custom incompatible kernel, which happens to also use various pieces of Linux kernel code, and then name their OS distribution, say, "Linux Gold" or something similar. Because that would be shady, exploitative, and misleading.

When Google forked Webkit, they renamed it to Blink, not "Webkit Gold". When Open Office was forked, it became "Libre Office" and not "Open Office Deluxe". When ownCloud was forked, it became "nextCloud" and not "ownCloud Private", and so on. All of these projects happen to share more code with the original implementation than Bitcoin Private does with regard to Bitcoin.

I get it. You are fully on board of the hype train. You even came here and opened a discussion thread about it so any criticism of the project might be perceived as a criticism of yourself. I do not expect you to agree that the name is problematic but there is also no need to suggest that stealing names of open source projects is somehow perfectly acceptable under any circumstances.