BitcoinWhite Scam: Latest Example of a Fraudulent Bitcoin Hardfork

Fork madness is continuing well into 2018 as a number of Bitcoin forks have occurred or being announced.

Yet another somewhat unusual fork called Bitcoin White appeared on Bitcoin Talk back in November of last year. In addition to being a fork of bitcoin (supposedly), the project also held an ICO, although links to said ICO are now leading to dead pages.

So what is Bitcoin White? Is it legitimate? Does it really have a strong use case, or is it just another cash grab by an anonymous group?

The white paper

Weighing in at a not-too-hefty 14 pages, the white paper explains that the purpose of Bitcoin White is to “offer an easy to use, fully functional and plug & play ecosystem, by which developers can rapidly iterate their JavaScript applications, and easily deploy them into applications store built in the system (sic).”

Translating that into common English, it's a safe guess that what they're trying to say here is that they want to make a platform that competes with Lisk. Specifically, that it's a JavaScript-focused decentralized application platform.

The white paper makes several mentions of "BTW coin". BTW, not to be confused with the internet slang for "by the way", is the team's chosen symbol for their currency. If the native currency for this platform is really called BTW coin, then it's full name would be "Bitcoin White Coin".

Mr. White and his rainbow crew

Normally, cryptocurrency teams make special efforts to reveal who they are, what their experience is, and why you should trust them. For instance, many ICO's have begun to include photos and LinkedIn accounts on their team page.

Bitcoin White, however, has chosen to go in the completely opposite direction. Instead of just saying that the team is anonymous, they put in the additional effort to create and post little animated videos of each team member wearing a different colored mask, and the same gray hoodie, a white button-up shirt, and a purple tie.

The team members are all named "Mr." plus a color. The team ends with a Mr. White of which only a disembodied mask can be seen, and the only description given for this supposed individual is "???". Clearly, no attempt is being made to build trust in this regard.

Cracks in the façade appear

A little further digging quickly reveals that there is a lot more going on with Bitcoin White.

Some of this information is available on Reddit. The official Bitcoin White webpage links to a Reddit user account called BTWhiteTeam. That user has only posted one message, and its to the ICO investor Sub Reddit three months ago. Inside is a link to the main page but also several highly suspicious comments.

Some of these comments include simple statements such as "good project", "straight to the moon… It's the greatest project ever for everyone to be part of." And another that says "it's amezing(sic) project".

When you check the post history and information about these accounts, it's easy to discover the problem. All of these accounts were created essentially just to post this message. While some of them have two or three other messages on other sub Reddit's, their role essentially meaningless.

Further, all of these accounts are less than three months old. Many of the accounts were created just shortly before these posts were made. It's also interesting that on this particular Reddit thread, there are no negative or suspicious comments. That in itself is extremely suspicious.

Even the most trustworthy and well put together ICO faces severe scrutiny on forums such as Reddit. The fact that it only has attention from these shill accounts is questionable at best.

The shilling is also not limited to Reddit. The same sort of activity can be found on the Bitcoin Talk page where there are a number of posts which just say something along the lines of "amazing project". When you look into the usernames behind these posts, you'll see again that they are generally very new accounts and all they do is post "amazing project" all over the site.

Careless communications

Another telltale sign of a project that just couldn't care less about the details is poorly written text. While it's not reasonable to expect all blockchain project teams to speak fluent English, it is reasonable to expect them to take their project seriously enough to ensure that their materials have been edited correctly.

The website white paper and official accounts on Bitcoin Talk are filled to the brim with numerous grammar mistakes. While they appeared to at least use a spellchecker (and many projects don't even do that) the grammar mistakes are simply far too numerous and unprofessional.

Even in their promotional video that appears right at the top of their main page, the video begins with the sentence “what should be the bitcoin?”

Conclusions

Overall, it would appear at least from what information is available that Bitcoin White is largely a hype project that aims to make use of traditional hype tactics such as offering an ICO and running an airdrop in order to bring as much attention to their project as possible.

While some users on bitcoin talk suspect that the project is, in fact, a fork of Lisk as it appears to also use delegated proof-of-stake, we cannot say this is true with certainty.

To make things even more confusing, there has been rumblings online that the project has used plagiarized information as well as a wallet that is essentially just cut-and-paste code.

Despite the fact that the project has been around since November, there is also word circulating that the wallet only collects updates from a single node, which is highly suspicious to say the least.

Given that the team refuses to identify themselves despite the fact that their project is not a privacy-focused one is highly odd. Also considering that the project seems far more focused on generating hype them with actually having a working product makes it seem far more like a cash grab than a real business venture or even an antibusiness, underground movement.

In summary, Bitcoin White is probably something that you can pass by safely and not worry yourself with. It just doesn't appear to be worth the trouble.