It seems that Monero will get its own fork soon in the form of an airdrop. For Ethereum and especially Bitcoin, forks are nothing new. Ethereum has Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin has, well, several forks including Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and soon Bitcoin Private aswell. One could argue that technically they are not all forks, but we will call them as such for simplicity reasons.

The MoneroV fork was announced back in January and the coins will be distributed with the help of an airdrop to the existing Monero holders in a 10:1 fashion. If you hold 1 Monero during the time of the snapshot, you will recieve 10 times the amount in MoneroV.

The fork plans to offer several additional features according to the roadmap and compared to the original chain:

Finite supply compared to the infinite supply of Monero

Planned:

Additional scaling changes

PoW modification

Sidechains

MimbleWimble integration

When you look at the idea for the first time it really seems to be a good decision to hold Monero for the airdrop alone, but when you start digging around you find out that there is no such thing as a free lunch in crypto. As BitGo Engineer Jameson Lopp aka @lopp and Monero Lead Dev Ricardo Spagni aka @fluffypony pointed out on twitter, if you are forking coins like Monero and you ask them to reuse their own keys in order to claim these airdrops (and enough users do so) you are attacking the built-in privacy not only for your own coins, but for other users as well. Ricardo Spagni called this attack a snowball attack and linked additional papers so people can read before they act.

Interesting: it sounds like if a significant portion of @monerocurrency users claimed tokens on airdropped forks, it would reduce privacy for both themselves AND other users who didn't claim forked tokens. https://t.co/j25w40qMei pic.twitter.com/5R0P7hdb7h — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) February 13, 2018

The post is up because it’s correct. Read up on the snowball attacks in MRL1 – https://t.co/ejHOTQpGYz — Riccardo Spagni on #35daylockdownSA (@fluffypony) February 13, 2018

This is especially serious considering Monero is starting to gain huge traction within the darknet markets, with the biggest markets already supporting Monero together with Bitcoin. The attack seems to be a thing to consider when supporting a fork like MoneroV.

If you truly believe in the original Monero developers and the direction they took so far with the project, would you really weaken the project for everyone else for a group of unknown developers and a quick flip? This is something every user has to decide for themselves. The MoneroV developers still have the opportunity to change the way their airdrop will handle new coins, but if they decide against any changes people might realize their original intentions.

Similarities to United Bitcoin

Another project that does something similar is the United Bitcoin project led by Jeff Garzik. First some background, Bloq aquired a Blockchain analytics startup in 2017 and a lot of people linked this to the fact that Jeff Garzik was also leading the Segwit2x Hard Fork attempt previously. The Segwit2x HF was called off previously for the lack of support, but the main idea behind it was that in order to gain your “new” coins you would have to move them to compatible wallets thus losing out on your coin’s privacy.

Now the UB project offers several additional features, like smart contracts and better scaling, but basically asks you again to unmask yourself. The method to claim your coins on the UB chain will be the following: Any inactive and unclaimed coins will go to the developers (while stating that the coin will have no premine) and in order to claim you need to go through a KYC process meaning that they will be able to link your identity to the complete history of your coins. They will know where you used them and where you traded them and an added bonus is that they will probably get ownership over Satoshi’s own coins as we don’t see a real chance that he will move them just because Jeff asks nicely. Some twitter users started calling the project as “KYC Coin or KYC Chain”, for a good reason.