A supposed upcoming bitcoin fork, bitcoin platinum, was revealed as a scam earlier this week by South Korean media outlets. Originally reported by South Korea’s JoongAng, bitcoin platinum was allegedly devised by a South Korean teenager as a fraudulent project.
Most of the information surrounding the proposed fork surfaced from Twitter, an October 25th bitcoin talk forum, and bitcoin platinum’s website. The forked currency would provide a number of updates to bitcoin’s core software, including Segwit 2x, 2.5 minute block times, and ASIC resistance. Marketing itself as “The World [sic] Best Blockchain Network that can ever be,” the coin’s key selling point was its return to GPU mining to protect the mining process from centralization.
Besides the above information, you’d find little else on bitcoin platinum. The coin’s website has no information on a development team and virtually no information on the mining pools that would support the fork. This lack of information, coupled with the site’s typos (see the quote in the former paragraph) and the general pulpy nature of its advertised features, left many community members skeptical about the coin’s legitimacy.
Given the recent allegations, such skepticism turned out to be healthy. According to a number of bitcoin platinum tweets posted in Korean, the scheme may have been devised so its orchestrator could profit off of bitcoin shorting. Two of these tweets read, “[bitcoin] shorting very good” and “who told you to buy bitcoin, shorting it is the best.”
After the initial reporting by JoongAng, which pegged the bitcoin platinum Twitter account to a South Korean teenager, the fork’s creator issued the following tweet:
Please forgive me. bitcoin platinum is a scam coin. I created the project to earn five mln Korean won.”
A Flop in a Sea of Forks
Scam allegations for bitcoin platinum come at a time when the market is brimming with anticipated forks.
Super bitcoin, lightning bitcoin, bitcoin god, bitcoin uranium, bitcoin cash plus, and bitcoin silver are purportedly scheduled to take place over the holidays and into the new year. Out of these forks, only super bitcoin and bitcoin cash plus have active websites, and the only readily available information for bitcoin uranium and bitcoin silver come from bitcoin talk forums that bear an eerie resemblance to bitcoin platinum’s own.
Seeing what has become of bitcoin platinum, it’s best to approach these upcoming forks with caution and diligent research.
