Bitcoin, as one of the largest market cap and the first practical implementation of Blockchain. It has seen immense growth and massive adoption all over the world but it suffers from one of the fundamental problem. A problem that is considered as a human right, that is ‘right to privacy’. People are already aware that all the transaction done using Bitcoin provides pseudonymity but it is not private. Everything including sender's or receiver's address and even the transaction amount is visible on Bitcoin Blockchain. If the government authorities wants to track anyone or even want to observe spending habits, they can easily do so by scrutinizing the exchanges.
Bitcoin Private ($BTCP) (website) is a fork of Bitcoin and ZClassic ($ZCL). It is a privacy focussed cryptocurrency with properties similar to that of Bitcoin. This means the transactions will be published on the Blockchain but the details of the sender, receiver and transactional data will not be identifiable. This provides people and business owners to conduct operations throughout the globe without disclosing their identities or transaction details.
Consider a scenario where Mark, a business owner in USA imports goods from other country, say China and sells it at a slightly higher price. If Mark were to make payments using Bitcoin, all the transactional information will be visible on the Blockchain. This puts Mark at a risk of disclosing the profit margins or other contractual information. As a result, Mark's business will loose competitive advantage and might eventually loose customers. Mark will have to decrease the prices of goods in order to maintain the demand. Bitcoin Private solves this problem by keeping all the transactional information private. Neither the sender nor the receiver information is disclosed during the transaction. Moreover, this leads to controlled transparency in case the business owners want to keep their financial books for record keeping and auditing.
Recently, a group called BitFury was able to analyse the Bitcoin transactions and has de-anonymized over 15% of the Bitcoin Network (BitFury De-Anonymized). This means around 96 million Bitcoin addresses’s were identified as per the source, publicly exposing the addresses linked to 14 million individuals. All the major exchanges over the world are facing challenges due to law and enforcements. The exchanges in some cases are forced to give user transaction details to the government agencies which all the more put user’s personal data and privacy at a huge risk. People has to start recognizing the need of the privacy on top of benefits provided by the cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin Private utilizes the same technology as Bitcoin along with most widely used cryptography called zk-Snarks (used in ZCash and ZClassic) to provide privacy. It will offer improved block size as compared to Bitcoin to provide faster transaction and reduced fees. Bitcoin Private is one of the most essential fork of Bitcoin which will provide same trust as the Bitcoin with additional benefits such as privacy and larger block size.
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