On 23 December, the Coin Metrics crypto analytics platform published the report that revealed the problem. According to the report, analysis of imported Bitcoin chain data has revealed an additional 2.04 million units of Bitcoin Private (BTCP) equivalent to $3.9 million were secretly mined.
Based on the white paper of the project, the total supply of Bitcoin Private (BTCP) is limited to 20.4 million coins. On 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 through a statement that “they quickly launched an investigation to determine whether the alleged findings of an additional sum of BTCP tokens were true or false.”
The statement indicates the timeline of events leading to the issue, revealing that a bounty was posted for a particular problem that was accepted by a developer who became a Bitcoin Private (BTCP) developer and a contributor to GitHub, giving him the opportunity to “merge requests.” After discovering a missing code line that allowed the fork mine to be exploited, the developer immediately left the project.
The culprit would then have used the bug to create no more than 2 million coins in the announced public fork mine. The Bitcoin Private Core team also noted that it is not clear whether the coins were transferred to another exchange or whether they were used or stored elsewhere.
The document finished 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.”
In the announcement, the team also indicated that they were unaware of the incident until Coin Metrics reported it to the public. In conclusion, the team states that they have contacted a number of major cryptographic exchanges, in particular HitBTC. Although HitBTC did not respond to any request for comments at the time of this report.
As of the time of the press, the price of the Bitcoin Private (BTCP) was $1.76, down approximately 6% in the last 24 hours, as shown in CoinGecko data. In September of this year, Bitcoin Core gave an update on vulnerability detection in their software. This vulnerability could have caused older versions of the Bitcoin Core code to crash if they attempted to process a block transaction to spend twice a similar amount of money.