John McAfee'southward anonymity-oriented Ghost project has largely plagiarized its whitepaper, according to developers of privacy coin PIVX.

"After a detailed investigation, it is obvious the GHOST whitepaper was plagiarized extensively from an outdated 2022 PIVX whitepaper," PIVX tweeted on May 17.

PIVX developers went on to conclude that "at to the lowest degree 20 of the 26 total pages" of the Ghost whitepaper "contain material directly plagiarized from the 2022 PIVX whitepaper," attaching a number of screenshots to dorsum their claims.

"PIVX is a MIT licensed, open up-source project," a representative for the blockchain told Cointelegraph, arguing that it tin be forked "as long as copyright credits are maintained in the code."

Equally PIVX spokesperson further told Cointelegraph, their main concern is "to brand certain people know that they are investing in a project with a Whitepaper that is full of technical inaccuracies". They elaborated:

"Specifications mentioned in Ghost whitepaper align with the Zerocoin Protocol, which is not merely outdated, just cryptographically flawed and can exist exploited. Furthermore, they seem to be unknowingly mixing the outdated Zerocoin specifications with the Sapling Protocol specifications. For example, Sapling does not use RSA-2048 accumulators and denominations at all."

The representative for PIVX informed Cointelegraph that they weren't considering taking legal action against Ghost, but were worried about the ethical trouble:

"The ethical and legal thing to practise, would be to remove it until they can supercede information technology with their own. Assuming their project is released on GitHub, we will cheque to make sure that the MIT license is maintained, and that copyright notices for PIVX are kept in place. If not, we will submit a DMCA takedown notice to Github, equally we take successfully washed multiple times."

A representative for Ghost told Cointelegraph that their starting code base "is a forked version of PIVX, like PIVX is a fork of Nuance", elaborating: "Simply we have done a lot of improvements and volition continue to introduce and put out amazing products."

The public statement published past the McAfee-backed exchange Switch echoes that sentiment, alleging that Ghost team initially considered forking Dash, merely opted for PIVX because it "has made some awesome additions and their product is better". It also confirms that "some things having to do with certain technical aspects of the projection were minimally reworded, although reworded none the less."

British-American entrepreneur John McAfee, who is currently living "in exile" due to tax-related charges from U.S. authorities, announced the Ghost project in Apr. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, McAfee claimed: "I oasis't paid taxes for ten years, and I never will."

According to the eccentric crypto advocate, Ghost will be underpinned by a Proof-of-Stake algorithm, and volition be tradable confronting major cryptocurrencies via atomic swaps on the McAfeeDex decentralized exchange. The anonymity token is scheduled to exist released in June.