Zclassic to Relaunch as Bitcoin Private, Prices Explode almost 100-fold

Have you ever heard of Zclassic?

Many people haven’t, but that’s about to change as Zclassic is suddenly taking off. Not only that, but Zclassic is apparently about to go under a major rebranding as “Bitcoin Private“.

Prices for Zclassic have exploded from just one dollar to almost $100 in just a matter of days following the announcement.

Read on as we go over what Zclassic is and why it’s value is exploding.

History of Zclassic

To understand Zclassic, we need to understand where it came from. Zclassic is a hard fork of another project called Zcash (ZEC). Zcash is a privacy centric token that has seen large growth in 2017.

It is also seen support from pseudo celebrity Edward Snowden (at least from a technical standpoint). Zcash has been met with large amounts of controversy, however, since it’s inception. Specifically, Zcash has two major issues that largely inspired the inception of Zclassic.

The first and arguably most contentious is what many are calling the founders tax.The founders tax means that 20 percent of every block reward for the first four years of the blockchain will be directly given to the founders of Zcash. Many people see this as a greedy, anti-community cash grab.

The second point of controversey that gained a lot of attenion is the "slow start" policy. The slow start was an intentional throttling of the release of Zcash into the ecosystem at large.

For the first 20,000 blocks, which was about 34 days, the release of Zcash tokens per block was heavily throttled. This was done to create artificial scarcity and increase the price of the token.

Zclassic came about as a fork of Zcash, minus the founders tax and the slow release. While first met with a fair amount of enthusiasm and interest, the currency has since dropped and held at very low values only around a dollar each. That all changed when the value suddenly spiked to be just under $100 each.

So what happened?

Bitcoin Private Emerges

In an announcement on Twitter, one of the developers behind Zclassic, Rhett Creighton, announced the change in the impending rebranding of Zclassic.

Not only is this a change in marketing and name, but in fact the new Bitcoin Private will be incorporating the bitcoin block chain and the existing Zclassic chain to create a new currency. The project aims at being a privacy centric bitcoin fork that uses the technology from Zcash.

Taxes and slow releases aside, the technology behind Zcash has been lauded as being highly privacy centric and effective.

Bitcoin Private will not be the only supposedly privacy-centric bitcoin fork on the market. Another fork, called bitcoin diamond, came out last year, and it also claims to be privacy-focused.

Bitcoin diamond has also had its fair share of controversy, with many accusing the largely anonymous individuals from China as simply creating an artificial cash grab and not really generating a new currency that offers real features or support. Accusations aside, bitcoin diamond is currently trading for around $30 each.

Pump Followed by Dump?

The incredible rise in price that Zclassic has seen in the past few days suggests that a dump or sell off event will occur shortly after. This has been the case with a number of other forked coins such as bitcoin cash, which saw prices of over $600 shortly after the fork, only for prices to drop to the low $300s for several months before spiking again. Bitcoin Cash is now trading at around $2,800 each.

As 2017 saw such a large number of bitcoin forks, and so far only two of them have been regarded as successful by the public at large (amid massive controversies) we’re not sure if the public will be ready for this new fork.

The sharp rise in price does suggest though that the public may be quite interested in this new development. This may also have a negative affect on Zcash prices as miners most likely do not want to pay the founders tax.

If Bitcoin Private becomes a popular, mineable, and "tax-free" alternative with all the same privacy protections in place, it could stand a chance to become a contender in 2018 and onwards.