Getting into more obscure forks (but believe me, there are many more to come), I decided to do a double take, because I got rid of these two the exactly same way. The previous cases were both 1:1 forks, meaning you got one unit for one BTC. This time we’ll see first case of unit change, which I think is a clever trick, to be honest.

If you haven’t done so yet, please read the Safety notice part in my introductory post to this series.

Bitcoin Diamond

Since we already have Bitcoin Gold, it’s only natural that someone would create Bitcoin Diamond (BCD). Diamonds are better than gold, am I right? I asked my wife and she confirmed, so there you go. The fork happened at block 495866 on November 24, 2017.

Bitcoin Diamond changed two things in the protocol. It uses a different mining algorithm, called X13. The 13 actually stands for number of different hashing algorithms used, when the result is passed from one to the other. It’s supposedly harder to implement in the special ASIC chip, so the mining can be done on regular GPUs. But as far as I know, building ASIC for it is possible, just probably not profitable enough yet.

The second change involves moving the decimal point in the amount. So for 1 BTC held you get 10 BCD. This is actually smart, because I think many people might get confused by all the different forks (who wouldn’t) and think: “Hey, shitfork X costs $10 and this thing BCD costs $5, so I can get twice as much of it. What a great deal!” Not.

They also have on their roadmap a feature called “amount encryption”, whatever that means, scheduled for Q2 2018, but I suspect the team will be long gone by then. Probably starting Bitcoin Amethyst.

Super Bitcoin

What is better than Bitcoin? Super Bitcoin (SBTC)! Notice the domain name is supersmartbitcoin.com. It’s a 1:1 fork, same as BCH or BTG. Not much else to say about it. The only difference from Bitcoin is increased block size, all other parameters are kept the same. It has Segwit, so in theory Lightning network could run on it. They also advertise zero-knowledge proofs on their roadmap, but roadmaps are cheap (as any product owner would confirm).

At this point, you will start noticing, how similar all these websites look. They always have a big picture at the top, some pictures of “the team”, a roadmap with advanced features that will be implemented in the future, FAQ section and so on. After seeing few fork homepages, you will start to notice the pattern.

Super Bitcoin forked at block 498888 on December 12, 2017.

Claiming

There is no direct support for either of these coins in Trezor (or Ledger, as far as I know), so we have to be more careful and use different wallet. I used bitpie, which we’ll be using quite a lot in claiming (and also dumping) the more obscure forks in the future. It has support for both BCD and SBTC. In theory, you could also use directly the exchange address, if you do not want to install bitpie.

I claimed these two forks using Walleting Services. I can confirm, that the web does what it says on the label. You need your seed for this, so make double sure you move all your coins from the original wallet (I do keep repeating that a lot, don’t I?). After few minutes I received the correct amount of both minus the 10% fee.

There are other ways to do this, which I used for other forks, but they are more complicated. So if you feel that 10% fee is too much or have really a lot of Bitcoin, wait few days and I will publish how to claim these (and other) forks manually yourself.

Dumping

To get rid of these two forks we’ll have to visit some more exotic exchanges. No respectable exchange would carry such shitcoins, so it’s only logical. I used gate.io, one of the many Chinese exchanges. If Bitstamp is a luxurious shopping mall, HitBTC your regular, but little run-down, department store, gate.io is a flea market. Get ready to use Google translate, because sometimes the text is in Chinese. I wouldn’t use my real e-mail to register and recommend you access it using a browser in disposable virtual machine. Anyway, I was able to sell both and get BTC safely to my Trezor, so all’s well that ends well.

There are more exchanges that carry these two coins, but they are more or less of the same quality (or lack thereof). Check out Coinmarketcap and try some others if you feel brave.

Final verdict

I was able to get 0.67% for BCD and 0.24% for SBTC respectively. As you can see, the reward is going down as we move into these obvious scam coins. On the other hand, it’s totally baffling to me that someone is willing to exchange their perfectly good Bitcoin for this garbage at any rate at all.