Bitcoin Private Fork

Rhett Creighton was the man behind Bitcoin Private, the fork of Zclassic and Bitcoin. He has suddenly abandoned the project and announced another fork called “Bitcoin Prime”. The Bitcoin Private team later announced that they were firing him and would continue the project with other developers. Let’s take a closer look at the story.

Bitcoin Private was a new kind of fork that was announced and founded by Rhett Creighton. He had previously forked Zclassic from Zcash by removing the miner’s reward. Next, he announced the Bitcoin Private project and led a team to fork it from both Bitcoin and Zclassic. Holders of both coins were rewarded with free Bitcoin Private. Bitcoin Private has the zk-SNARKs technology of Zcash with the Bitcoin brand name. The crypto space was excited about this new fork which was named a Spork since it was a fork of two coins.

The Zclassic price rose to $200 due to the hype that surrounded the fork announcement. The other factors were the “Bitcoin” name and the privacy feature being added. The community grew and was very optimistic that the Bitcoin Private would do well because of the privacy features incorporated into Bitcoin brand.

Zclassic Dump and Bitcoin Private Slump

The Zclassic price fell sharply from $200 to $5 after the snapshot date. Crypto Community was accusing Zclassic to be a pump and dump project, but holders were not bothered since they were going to get their new forked coin.

The Bitcoin Private community was optimistic at the beginning, eagerly anticipating the listing of Bitcoin Private on many exchanges. There was a disappointment when exchanges were slow to get the new cryptocurrency listed. The price of Bitcoin Private slightly rose to $50 after it was listed on Coinmarketcap.com.

All this while, there was no major announcement or roadmap from the Bitcoin Private team. Rhett Creighton also remained silent for an extended period.

Rhett Creighton Abandoned Bprivate

Rhett tweeted yesterday about a new fork called “Bitcoin Prime” which is a merge fork of Bitcoin and Primecoin ($XPM). Below is his tweet about the fork:

Understandably, the Bitcoin Private community was generally furious about Rhett’s announcement when his current project was having difficulties getting listed on exchanges.

The very next day, the Bitcoin Private team announced that they had fired Rhett Creighton and mentioned that it had a strong community of 500 plus contributors and was not dependent on one person. They also thanked Rhett for all his contributions so far to the project. Below is the tweet from the official twitter handle of Bitcoin Private.

After this announcement, the price of Bprivate started to tank and at the time of writing, it was down by 23% to $36 from a high of $50. Many members of the community felt they had been fooled by Rhett. Below is the tweet from Rhett in the month of January saying that Bprivate was the most important project that he had worked on at that time.

More Skeletons Coming Out of The Cupboard

After Rhett was fired from the Bitcoin Private team, more skeletons started tumbling out of his cupboard. One of the Bitcoin Private developers admitted that it was difficult to get in touch with Rhett during the crucial time of the fork when the high ranking Blockchain companies wanted to contact Rhett in particular for collaboration. Below are the comments by the developer

Rhett did not seem bothered about being fired from the Bitcoin Private team since he was busy with the development of his next fork – Bitcoin Prime. Below is a screenshot of the official Bitcoin Prime Telegram group. He has already instructing people to quickly build a Github, Twitter and Reddit page.

It was revealed by Jackson Palmer (Creator of Dogecoin) on Twitter that the name “Rhett” was a fake one. The tweet claimed that his real name was “Everett Forth”. Below is the tweet that revealed that he changed his name too.

With this latest move, Rhett seems to have made himself a “serial forker and a scammer.” His reputation has also taken a serious hit. It would be interesting to see how his new fork performs. This is a wake-up call to members of the crypto community who dive neck deep into whatever project is the latest without careful considerations. The community should do a deep dive in analyzing the project before investing in it. Otherwise, scammers like Rhett will enrich themselves with dubious forks. Bitcoin private is a lesson learnt and people should stop investing in pump and dump projects that will only enrich the founders like Rhett.