Bitcoin Private — Like Bitcoin, but Private
Bitcoin Private is a consolidation of the best innovations from Zclassic and Bitcoin through a dual-fork on February 28th. Bitcoin Private shows strong emphasis on anonymity, decentralization, fast transactions, open source, and community. In addition, its core team of developers are highly active and ambitiously taking on a major project called The Rebase which will lead into lightning network development.
Privacy
In recent months it has become apparent that cryptocurrencies once thought to be anonymous and fungible are far from it. Governments, Banks and other institutions in cooperation with Exchanges have learned how to track our transactions and identify us through the block chain.
Coming from an Accounting background I can say that this is unacceptable when it comes to the global adoption of cryptocurrency.
No major merchant is going to allow their revenues, purchases and account holdings to be accessible to their competitors and the general public.
Bitcoin Private resolves these issues with mathematically provable privacy inherited from ZClassic called zk-SNARKs.
When shielded addresses are used sender and recipient addresses and transaction data are unidentifiable. Without this data, its impossible to identify users and trace transactions through the block chain or view a user’s account holdings.
In addition, the core team plans to release a TOR wallet in Q3 of 2018.
- This wallet will further disguise your identity by encrypting your data and traffic across different Tor servers.
- Anyone attempting to identify your PC would see traffic coming from random nodes on the Tor network instead.
Moving forward into Q4 we will see the Dandelion Privacy protocol activated.
- It’s a superior obfuscation technique which basically mixes transactions between nodes. This makes it harder to tell which node a transaction originated from.
Additionally, in Q4 the development team plans to make zk-SNARKs more efficient which will allow for all wallets to use shielded private transactions by default.
As you can see, the Bitcoin Private team is committed to making it possible for merchants to consider adopting cryptocurrency without revealing their financial information to competitors, and ensuring that our right to private transactions is protected by default. Only becoming public when we choose.
As it should be!
Decentralized
Like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Private supports peer-to-peer transactions which are processed by miners and verified by network nodes.
Decentralization is likely the most important principle Bitcoin and most other popular cryptocurrencies were founded on. Unfortunately, it is under attack by ASIC manufacturers such as Bitmain, who control the vast majority of hash power and centralizes it in Asia.
They accomplish this primarily by only releasing obsolete Asic’s to the general public that come with no warranty, once they are running their latest cutting edge models.
The lack of warranty alone is enough to deter most people from purchasing them and those outside of Asia have to contemplate what sort of customs fees they may be hit with for having Asics shipped to them.
The idea of a 51% attack aside, some people think companies like Bitmain may replace central banks in a post fiat world as their significant hash power allows them to accumulate vast amounts of cryptocurrency. Their decision to hold or dump has a significant impact to the money supply.
Initially, ASICs were solely used on coins that run on the SHA-256 algorithm. Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash both run on this algo and neither have shown any indication of plans to move away from the threat to decentralization that ASICs present.
More recently other coins have seen an influx of hash coming from new ASICs that can now mine on non SHA-256 algos.
Bitcoin Private uses the Equihash algorithm which is known for being ASIC resistance. It is memory intensive and GPU’s which are widely held by the public at large can mine on it.
The choice to use Equihash is a testament to the Bitcoin Private team’s dedication to decentralization.
However, Bitmain has recently created an Equihash ASIC.
To further demonstrate their commitment to decentralization the Bitcoin Private team quickly responded to this news by opening discussions with the Equihash community at large to determine the best course of action to address the threat from Bitmain.
Discussions are still underway, but the team has confirmed they will be moving away from Equihash 200,9-. Possibly to a more memory intensive version of Equihash, or a different algorithm all together.
Decentralization will likely be an ongoing battle. But it’s an important battle for the crypto community to win. I am happy to see Bitcoin Private leading the fight.
Fast
We all owe thanks to Bitcoin for introducing us to a new way of transacting online. However, like most first generation technology it is slow compared to the generations that follow. With its 1 MB block size and 10 minute block times it can be painfully slow to move value from one place to another. In addition, it’s mining, deposit and withdrawal fees are just way too high to compete with newer cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin Private on the other hand supports 2MB blocks with a 2.5 min block time, which allows for way faster and cheaper transactions
Open Source
Bitcoin Private’s codebase is available in Github for verification by anyone. I personally enjoy receiving Github notifications through their discord channel. It’s great to be able to see the open source community knocking off mile stones on their road map.
Community Driven
Bitcoin Private has over 150 contributing members who reside all over the world. It also has a continually growing community of over 50,000 members.
To the bottom right of btcprivate.org you can find links to their active social media accounts and community resources. My personal favorites include:
- Medium — Where the core team without fail posts Bi-weekly community updates
- Reddit — Where you can find posts on all things Bitcoin Private related.
- Discord — Where you can chat live with active members in the community and the team themselves. Come visit, they have cookies ;)
A Fair Start
Bitcoin Private had no premine, and there was was no founder’s reward. It was air dropped to both ZClassic and Bitcoin holders.
The significance of air dropping to Bitcoin holders can not be understated.
They are the first and largest community in crypto, and I see the development team placing Bitcoin Private in their hands as an invitation into the next chapter of crypto.
Now some may think that like other Bitcoin forks that use the name Bitcoin, doing so is nothing more then a marketing attempt, or an attempt to ride on the waves of Bitcoin.
However, I think we can all say that after several failed projects with the name Bitcoin that that ship has sailed. Nowadays using the name Bitcoin makes things more challenging, not easier.
The truth is, with Bitcoin’s decentralization, anonymity, and fungability becoming compromised over the past year I feel the Bitcoin Private team wants to invite Bitcoin users to transition to a project that solves these problems and pays homage to its origins.
You can see this intent in action as part of The Rebase project.
The Rebase
Due to the majority of developers in crypto working on Bitcoin, most other projects are years behind in block chain improvements. Bitcoin Private is currently in the process of rebasing its block chain and privacy features to the latest Bitcoin code base.
The team have made great strides on this project and expect it to be completed in Q3 of this year.
Not only will this bring stability and security updates to Bitcoin Private, it will also enable second layer solutions such as full Segwit and the Lightning Network.
Bitcoin Private will then be able to maintain feature parity with Bitcoin while using the best privacy technologies available.
I think this accomplishment will attract Bitcoin core developers to Bitcoin Private as they will have to ask themselves which block chain is the best to further innovate on?
I think the obvious answer to this question will be the one with built in privacy!
As a member of this great community project I invite you join our growing community of 50,000+ members and help to bring Bitcoin Private to the forefront of a growing privacy movement in crypto.
If you enjoyed the read and would like to see more, or simply believe I am in dire need of writing lessons you can contribute to either cause at (you guessed it) my Bitcoin Private Address:
b1JLeRwBx9YpApowb5zh8fREbFvP49gfp5r
