Bitcoin Private hard fork incoming to deal with 1.8M premine coins

Bitcoin Private came under fire couple of days back as CoinMetrics exposed their team from doing a premine of ~1.8 million coins and hiding them under shielded addresses. In addition to that, there are 20,000 additional coins as well. To deal with this embarrassing situation, the Bitcoin Private team is planning to do a hard fork and remove the shielded coins from existence.

The BTCP team is planning to do this hard fork as soon as possible as they think that the person who created additional coins could start moving those coins out of shielded addresses.

Users are requested not to move their coins. Exchanges are being approached to stop deposit and withdrawals of BTCP.

There is no word who created the additional coins, so the bad actor could still be on the Bitcoin Private team. But, HitBTC exchange has been approached to identify the bad actor.

In addition to this, the team is planning to hard fork to remove all unmoved coins as well – the coins that are yet to be claimed by people / exchanges. This is said to be greater than 12 million BTCP. The team says this will make circulating supply more accurate as well. However, this does not solve problem of illegitimate coins.