• Yokemate of Keyboards
    Yokemate of Keyboards
    takemehomegrandma
    Posts: 2720 from 2003/2/24
    Quote:

    ASiegel wrote:

    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.


    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 ]
    MorphOS is Amiga done right! :-)
    MorphOS NG will be AROS done right! :-)
  • »10.08.18 - 21:23
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