Bitcoin forks are invariably contentious, but the latest batch could be the most controversial yet. Bitcoin Prime and Anonymous Bitcoin have been labeled as shameless cash grabs that are little more than pump and dumps orchestrated by opportunistic developers. The projects’ architects of these schemes, naturally, have hit back.
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New Forks Fuel a Furore
Rhett Creighton has always been a polarizing figure, but his latest stunt has united a swathe of the cryptocurrency community in condemnation. EOS’ Dan Larimer is synonymous with jumping from project to project, but his flitting looks like a lifetime of faithful service compared to Rhett’s itchy feet. Having announced a dual fork of bitcoin and zclassic last December, which inflated the price of ZCL and enriched Rhett and his cronies no end, he’s now following suit with bitcoin and primecoin to create Bitcoin Prime.
Meanwhile, a separate project is doing another fork of zclassic and bitcoin to create Anonymous Bitcoin which aims to “become the new standard for truly private banking”. This means that zlassic will now have forked twice with bitcoin to create a pair of zk-SNARK-based privacy coins – three times if you include zencash, which was also born from a ZCL fork. Zen, to its credit, has since gone on to forge its own community and to differentiate itself from its parent coin. Bitcoin Private, on the other hand, has done little more than infuriate ZCL bagholders, many of whom lost money on the deal. ZCL has now died and been reborn more times than anyone can count, and is currently up 242% in a month.
A Prime Way to Pump a Dead Coin
Primecoin
