Bitcoin Private Wallet – Secure your Bitcoin Private (BTCP) assets | Ledger

One of many forks of Bitcoin’s core protocol, Bitcoin Private is an effort to fulfill a more advanced privacy implementation of the legacy cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Private was co-forked from ZClassic and Bitcoin using snapshots of both chains at specific block heights, enabling owners of corresponding BTC or ZCL stashes to claim equivalent amounts of BTCP on the new chain.

Like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Private uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus model, however, miners in Bitcoin Private use the Equihash mining algorithm compared to Bitcoin’s SHA-256. Besides a slightly increased block size and reduced block time, Bitcoin Private’s main value proposition is advanced on-chain privacy.

The zk-SNARK technology is widely considered to be one of the most advanced privacy-preserving innovations applied to public blockchains, and is used in similar privacy-oriented cryptocurrency network ZCash.

Transaction amounts, sender, and recipient details are obfuscated using the technology, but one of the trade-offs is that transactions are much more cumbersome, leading to blockchain bloat in the long-run.

Bitcoin Private’s native asset (BTCP) follows a long-run supply curve like Bitcoin, which is supposed to yield a capped final supply of 21 million BTCP.

However, a study by CoinMetrics identified a covert pre-mine by some of the network’s founders — equating to roughly 2 million BTCP that were not disclosed to the public.