With the latest Bitcoin Private (BTCP) scandal, is it safe to say that all bitcoin forks are scams?

• 2 million Bitcoin Private tokens pre-mined

Crypto data provider Coinmetrics released a report titled “Don’t trust, verify: A Bitcoin Private case study” which revealed some damning information about this popular fork-merge of Bitcoin and ZClassic. Among other things, the report discovered that 2.04 million BTCP coins were candidly pre-mined before the miners were given an ability to start mining the currency.

Bitcoin Private was originally envisioned as a currency that will take all the best features of Bitcoin and ZClassic (itself a fork of Zcash), and among other things it inherited the total supply of 21 million units from Bitcoin. However, an additional “2.04 million units were covertly minted during the import of the Bitcoin UTXO and sent to the BTCP shielded pool” in a move which made the actual BTCP supply cap sit at 23.04 million. Shielded pools contain coins stored in shielded addresses, which employ Zk-SNARKS, a privacy technology that anonymizes transactions.

Coinmetrics goes into more detail how this premine happened in the mentioned article published here. To sum it up, they explain that 102 “special blocks” were produced by the Bitcoin Private network that contained 400 extra outputs containing 50 bitcoins each. Multiplying these numbers we can conclude that 2,040,000 extra BTCP were pre-produced.

This newly-discovered information directly contradicts the information given in the BTCP whitepaper and BitcoinTalk announcement thread, both of which said that the total supply will sit at 21 million and that the coin won’t have any pre-mines. Around 300k BTCP has been withdrawn from the shielded pool, meaning that there are still 1.74 million coins sitting in it. BTCP team released no official communication about this issue at the moment of writing.

Is it safe to call a vast majority of bitcoin forks pure scam projects?

Aside of Bitcoin Cash, which is more or less a legitimate project with malicious intentions expressed through attempt of bitcoin brand hijacking, there is a high probability that all other projects birthed through the fork of bitcoin blockchain are utter scams. Here is a list of all forks and let me know which one can be argued to be a legit project?

• Bitcoin Cash: Forked at Block 478558, 1 August 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCH
• Bytether: Cross fork from Bitcoin to Ethereum blockchain at block 478558, 1 August 2017. For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTH ERC-20 token.
• Bitcoin Clashic: Forked at Block 478558, 1 August 2017. For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCHC / BCL
• Bitcoin Gold: Forked at Block 491407, 24 October 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTG
• Bitcoin Diamond: Forked at Block 495866, 24 November 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 10 BCD
• UnitedBitcoin: Forked at Block 498777, 12 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 UB
• Bitcoin Hot: Forked at Block 498848, 12 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 100 BTH
• Super Bitcoin: Forked at Block 498888, 12 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 SBTC
• BitcoinX: Forked at Block 498888, 12 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 10,000 BCX
• Oil Bitcoin: Forked at Block 498888, 12 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 OBTC
• Bitcoin World: Forked at Block 499777, 17 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 10000 BTW
• Lightning Bitcoin: Forked at Block 499999, 19 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 LBTC
• Bitcoin Stake: Forked at Block 4999999, 19 December 2017, For each 1 BTC, you get 100 BTCS
• BitEthereum: Forking on 21 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 3.940616 BITE
• Bitcoin Top: Forked at Block 501118, 26 December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTT
• Bitcoin God: Forked at Block 501225, forked on 27th December 2017. For each 1 BTC you get 1 GOD
• Bitcoin FILE: Forked at Block 501225, forked on 27th December 2017. For each 1 BTC you get 1000 BIFI
• Bitcoin SegWit2X X11 Not to be confused with a previous fork SegWit2X with the same name. Forked at Block 501451, 28 December 2017. For each 1 BTC you get 1 B2X
• Bitcoin Uranium: Forking on 31st December 2017, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BUM.
• Bitcoin Pizza: Forking at Block 501888, 1st January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BPA
• Bitcoin All: Forking on 1st January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTA. Referenced on steemit post.
• Bitcoin Cash Plus: Forking at Block 501407, Expected on 2nd of January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCP
• Bitcoin Smart: Forking at Block 505050, 21 January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCS
• Bitcoin Interest: Forking at Block 505083, 22 January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCI
• Quantum Bitcoin: Forking on 28th January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 QBTC
• Bitcoin LITE: Forking on 30th January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTCL
• Bitcoin Ore: Forking on 31st January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCO
• Bitcoin Private: Forking in January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTCP (also if you have 1 ZCL you get 1 BTCP)
• Bitcoin ATOM: Forking at Block 505888 on 24 January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BCA
• Bitcoin BitVote (BTV): Forking at Block 505050, 21 January 2018, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BTV
• Bitcoin BiZero (BZX): Forking in January 2019, For each 1 BTC you get 1 BZX

Bytecoin did the covert premine first

According to Monero`s lead developer Riccardo Spagni:

“The reality is that 82% of the (Bytecoin) coins were already mined before its ’public’ release. Even if the premined coins weren’t done so maliciously, it still means 82% of the coins in the hands of persons unknown and invisible. It basically centralizes a decentralized currency.”

82% is a huge number of coins to be premined and gives the developers and stakeholders the opportunity to influence the price of BCN solely with their holdings. What is more, this opens the possibility of a “pump and dump”, meaning that the premined Bytecoins can be dumped on the market which, in turn, would cause the price to drop significantly.

“Even if you take the fact that Monero is clearly leading the innovation race, I would think it dangerous to touch a coin where 82% of it is held by unknown actors who were not publicly observed during the period where they supposedly mined the coin. Having a shady history does not set a good precedent.”  –Spagni also says.