Why forking Bitcoin to become a privacy coin is dumb because miners won't mine it.

in bitcoin •  7 years ago  (edited)

There is a recent article (Bitcoin Private Fork Aiming to Make Bitcoin Anonymous) which shares that Rhett Creighton is planning on forking Bitcoin to create a new privacy coin -- "Bitcoin Private (BTCP)". This fork is supposed to happen on February 28th.

The supposed benefit of this fork is that zk-Snarks will be added to Bitcoin, however, I don't see the point.

There are already several well-made "privacy" coins already in existence. ZCash (ZEC), ZClassic (ZCL), ZenCash (ZEN), along with Monero (XMR) and Komodo (KMD). [If I have confused the privacy coins, I'm not the expert here.]

I also believe getting miners to actually mine a "new" bitcoin will be next to impossible. As far as I understand, Bitcoin is a SHA-256 coin which is mined primarily by ASICs (Antminers). That puts mining out of the hands of the "ordinary folk," the guys and gals who would use a privacy coin.

ZCash (and many of the privacy-oriented coins) are ETHASH coins which can be mined by ordinary GPUs, meaning with a computer or a GPU mining rig.

Why make a privacy-based Bitcoin fork which will likely not survive because miners won't mine it?

#bitcoin #cryptocurrency #news #crypto #blockchain

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