After a detailed investigation, it is obvious the GHOST whitepaper was plagiarized extensively from an outdated 2018 PIVX whitepaper.
Based on what McAfee and his team have published so far, we can confirm that there are many similarities between GHOST and PIVX. Their coin specs, feature set, and protocols mentioned, all align with PIVX’s specifications and the recently announced new privacy protocol (Sapling/zk-SNARKs) that is currently being implemented.
We would like to clarify that we have NO affiliation/association with the GHOST project, and have had no contact up to this point. Their current whitepaper, if implemented into a codebase, possesses several critical issues.
We found multiple instances where John McAfee used exactly the same wording, structure and content flow found in the 2018 PIVX whitepaper. This can be seen here (pages 2, 7 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here where the GHOST coin specs are an identical 1:1 copy (pages 8, 9 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 10, 11 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 11, 14 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 14, 15 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 16, 17 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here where in this instance (page 17 in the GHOST whitepaper) GHOST copied and pasted the content of an instant transaction demonstration, however, forgot to remove a color key referencing a diagram that was not included.
This continues here (pages 18, 19 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 19, 20 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 21, 22 in the GHOST whitepaper)…
…and here (pages 22, 23, 24, 25 in the GHOST whitepaper).
We do not know what code base Ghost is forked from yet, but given the above, it is most likely PIVX. At least 20 of the 28 pages found in the Ghost whitepaper contain plagiarized material directly from the 2018 PIVX whitepaper (5 additional pages including front and back covers are mostly graphics).
Please note this important point: PIVX expects to complete implementation of the new Sapling/zk-SNARKs privacy protocol in Q4 2020. As such, if Ghost is indeed a fork of PIVX, it will either be waiting for PIVX to complete the privacy code or will use its own solution. Although Ghost states it will use Sapling/zk-SNARKs, the Ghost whitepaper references obsolete Zerocoin Protocol specifications. For example, Sapling does not use any RSA-2048 accumulators and denominations as referenced by GHOST on pages 8 and 25.
As always, please DYOR and invest wisely.
