By CCN: Why buy the original Bitcoin (BTC), when you can own some Bitcoin 2 (BTC2)? You, like most people, probably thought that shady cryptocurrency forks are a thing of the past. But boy, oh boy, were you wrong.
Bitcoin 2, an aptly-named Bitcoin fork, made a splash this morning by leading the cryptocurrency market with an almost 800 percent gain in the past 24 hours. After quietly launching last year, this new cryptocurrency quickly rose through the market cap ranks today to crack the top 100.
BTC2 reached a peak of over $4 today before drastically falling back down. | Source: CoinMarketCap
Why Is BTC2 Pumping?
The charts paint a clear picture predicting Bitcoin 2’s success. If you look at the 4-hour candlestick chart, you can see a classic rising wedge begin to…just kidding. It’s most likely another victim of a pump-and-dump investing scam.
Although Bitcoin 2 is experiencing impressive growth, it’s occurring with only $35,000 of daily trading volume. To give you some perspective, Bitcoin’s (the original’s) daily trading volume currently sits above $18.5 billion. A bored whale is most likely pushing the BTC2 price up to later dump their holdings on all the investors who felt some FOMO and purchased it. Don’t be one of those people.
Even if you wanted to invest, BTC2 is only available on two exchanges – Crex24 and Escodex. Both platforms manage less than $30,000 of daily trading volume.
‘It’s Like Bitcoin, But Better!’
Bitcoin 2 forked from Bitcoin in February last year, implementing the Zerocoin protocol for anonymity and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) for scalability.
The project also boasts instant transactions, a suite of wallets, and next to zero actual users. Over 95 percent of the BTC2 coin supply has yet to be claimed by bitcoin holders since the initial fork.
Additionally, activity on the network is sparse. Currently, the block explorer shows just two transactions in each block.
All of Bitcoin 2’s blocks are nearly empty. | Source: bitc2.org
Surprisingly, the project has a relatively active Github repo and Reddit page with updates on both in the last month. Down the road, the development team plans to implement the Dandelion protocol and integrate I2P.
Even if the development team accomplishes their goals, though, it’s hard to see this cryptocurrency becoming anything but a vehicle for scam artists and fools.
