Bitcoin Private (BTCP) development team has confirmed that not more than 2.04 million units of the BTCP token were created. These coins, according to the report were never intended to be a part of the blockchain via an official statement on Dec. 24.
Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD
| Name | Price | 24H % |
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 | $0.00 | -0.15% |
2.04 Million BTCP Tokens Were Created, Total Supply of BTCP Tokens: 20.4 Million Units
As of December 23, crypto analytics platform Coin Metrics published the report that revealed the issue. As per the report that when the import of Bitcoin chain data was initiated, an extra 2.04 million units of Bitcoin Private (BTCP) equivalent to $3.9 million were minted secretly. Based on the project’s white paper, the overall supply of Bitcoin Private (BTCP) amounts to 20.4 million coins. One the other hand the secretly pre mined Bitcoin Private (BTCP) took “the initial supply to at least 22.6 million.”
The Bitcoin Private core team revealed via a statement that after receiving the reports, they “quickly launched an investigation to determine whether the alleged findings of an extra sum amount of BTCP tokens were true or false.” And after performing the internal audit, the team concluded that Coin Metrics’ findings were actually correct.
The statement indicates the timeline of events leading to the issue, unveiling that a bounty was posted for a specific problem, which was accepted by one developer, who became a Bitcoin Private (BTCP) developer and a contributor on GitHub, giving him the opportunity to merge pull requests.” The developer completed the task merged their code and got a reward. After discovering a missing line of code that made it possible for the fork mine to be exploited, and the bounty was claimed the developer immediately left the project.
After that, the culprit reportedly took advantage of the bug to create no more than 2 million coins in the public fork mine that was announced.
Uncertainty Over of the Purpose of the Coins
The Bitcoin Private core team also noted that it isn’t clear whether the coins in question were transferred to another exchange or used/stored elsewhere. The concluded its statement with these remarks:
“This exploit could have been taken advantage of only during the fork mine, which has already occurred earlier in the year. Therefore, it is safe to say for this bug exploit won’t reoccur, nor can it be exploited any further.”
The team also indicated in the announcement that they did not know about the incident until Coin Metrics reported it to the public.
In conclusion, the team states that they have contacted several major crypto exchanges particularly HitBTC about the situation. Although as at the time of this report HitBTC has not responded to any request for comments.
Bitcoin Private (BTCP) Trading at $1.97 in Last 24 Hours
As of press time, the price of the Bitcoin Private (BTCP) stood at $1.97, which down by about 7% in the last 24 hours, as found in data provided by CoinMarketCap. In September this year, Bitcoin Core gave an update relating to the detection of a vulnerability in their software. That vulnerability could have caused the crash of older versions of the Bitcoin Core code if they tried to process a block transaction to spend a similar amount of funds twice.
Princess Ogono is a writer, lawyer and fitness enthusiast. She believes cryptocurrencies are the future. When she's not writing, she spends time with her adorable cat, Ginger and works out often.
