During the import of Bitcoin (BTC) chain data, a whopping 2.04 million additional units of altcoin BTC were secretly minted. According to an official statement by the Bitcoin Private Contribution Team, these additional altcoins were never intended to exist on the blockchain. The statement says they immediately launched an investigation to ascertain whether or not the alleged findings of the additional BTCP coins were true.
Following an internal audit, the Team confirms that Coin Metric’s findings were mathematically accurate. Beingcrypto says that the research team at Coinmetrics uncovered the hidden pre-mine. According to the report, “an as-yet-unknown bad actor exploited a potentially intentional loophole in the forking process, allowing it to create more BTCP than should be possible by generating numerous extra-large blocks, yielding more than two million BTC that shouldn’t exist.”
Cointelegraph, a timeline of events, has been cited. “It was subsequently accepted by a developer, who then became a BTCP developer and was promoted to a contributor on GitHub. The developer then completed the issue, merged their own code and received their reward.” As per various sources, the Team found one line missing in the code. This allowed the fork mine to be exploited as the nodes were not properly verifying the falsified fork blocks.
This has been a below the belt blow for Bitcoin Private (BTCP). As the details came out, the company lost over a quarter of its value within a couple of hours. While the cryptocurrency market experiences impressive gains this festive season, BTCP is plunging.
Bitcoin Private should not be mistaken for ‘Bitcoin.’ Though similar in many ways, BTCP has additional privacy options. Beingcrypto describes it as the result of a fork-merge between both Bitcoin (BTC) and ZClassic (ZCL). The best parts of both interwoven creating the new BTCP.