The number of existing and upcoming Bitcoin hard forks continues to grow at an alarming rate. In fact, it seems the next fork is always just around the corner. Bitcoin Private, for example, is one of those upcoming forks, but these tokens will not be issued to BTC holders. That in itself is a rather remarkable decision. Whether or not anyone will care about this fork remains to be determined, though.
It is evident that Bitcoin lacks privacy and anonymity traits. Although some government officials like toBitcoin as anonymous, it is anything but. Instead, users achieve some degree of pseudonymity when using the world’s leading cryptocurrency, but that is far from the same as anonymity. Adding more privacy-centric elements to Bitcoin is certainly possible, although it will not be easy whatsoever. Various developers are contemplating borrowing elements from Monero to achieve that goal in the future, though.
Until that happens, we will most likely see more hard forks which offer some privacy upgrades. Bitcoin Private is a perfect example of how things will most likely evolve in this regard. It is a brand new Bitcoin hard fork which uses the same privacy technology as is found in ZClassic these days. More specifically, the fork will use zk-snarks to achieve privacy, even though it still comes nowhere close to actually being a privacy-oriented currency. Optional privacy is good, but some people will look for something more than that.
Additionally, Bitcoin Private will serve as a peer-to-peer form of digital money in which no intermediaries are involved. Transactions will be broadcast and verified by nodes before they are passed along to miners for final approval. There will be a slightly bigger block size compared to Bitcoin, which will be of some interest to users all over the world. After all, Bitcoin has major scaling issues, and they won’t be resolved overnight without some major shakeups.
What is rather remarkable about the Bitcoin Private fork is how the new BTCP tokens will not be issued to Bitcoin users themselves. Instead, this airdrop will occur on a 1:1 basis with Bitcoin Cash and ZClassic holders. It is a rather interesting approach, although it remains to be seen if this will give the project more legitimacy in the long run. So far, there is no official whitepaper providing further specifics, which means there’s plenty of room for speculation.
As is usually the case when a new fork is announced, no exchange has officially confirmed support for it as of yet. That is not unusual, mind you, as there are still a lot of aspects of this new fork which have yet to be clarified. Whether or not any major exchanges will support this airdrop moving forward remains to be seen. Other forks have been called off due to a lack of exchange support in recent weeks.
Although its website claims there is a team of 50-ish contributors on the project, there are still some issues to be resolved on GitHub. For example, it is unclear if there will be hardware wallet support, a proper wallet, proper mining difficulty adjustments, and so forth. All of these issues can be resolved over time, as there is no official launch date set for this fork just yet. It is unclear if this fork uses Bitcoin Cash’s new CashAddr address format or sticks with the traditional Bitcoin address model.
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