Like sailors of old, those of us navigating the high seas of the crypto world have had to adapt to a rapidly changing environment: rogue waves, storms, doldrums, pirates and treasures. Here in 2019, one can easily forget crypto’s roots with all the flashy distractions from large ICO’s, nauseating CNBC coverage, and a flood of cheeseball corporate marketing. Yet amid all this noise, the very core of crypto, the vision originally dreamed of in Bitcoin’s whitepaper is still alive and stronger than ever. One area where this is most observable is in the evolution of privacy coins. Pirate Chain is the newest iteration in this evolution, what follows are the reasons why this is a project worth keeping a close eye on.

There is no more denying that privacy is a much bigger issue than just a way for criminals to hide. From the subtle yet incredible influence that Facebook and Google’s algorithms have on the information we see, to the events at Cambridge Analytica that showed us that massive-scale data harvesting can be utilized to literally steer entire populations like cattle by the highest bidder. Where we spend our money reveals as much about us as the words we speak. With the world quickly evolving to rely more and more on the internet, an example easily highlighted by the retail apocalypse underway in the US, having private methods to transact online will be an essential element to keeping the expanding data/surveillance industry from eroding our individual and collective sovereignty.

If we look back at crypto history it is clear how Bitcoin adoption grew through online markets that, ahem, needed more privacy than mainstream methods of transaction. Privacy and independence from third party institutions was the original use-case, one that was eagerly adopted by the dark fringes of the internet who required it to even exist. Although the nefarious activities conducted there are not what most of the world would agree with, the success and usefulness of BTC in these markets eventually brought awareness to a larger audience that agreed the principles of an independent and private currency were worth investing time, energy, and fiat into. As BTC transactions became more scrutinized, a need for a more private solution arose, a gap that was eventually filled by Monero. Since then, there has been a race to develop the next best privacy option, fueled by a rapidly growing chain analysis sector determined to de-anonymize all cryptocurrency transactions. Having a way to transact value online anonymously has and always will be something that people of all walks of life will want, a point that can only become more popular as the ways our data is used against us becomes more apparent.

Enter Pirate Chain.

Pirate Chain is gaining notoriety as a truly advanced and, despite the humourous ticker ($ARRR), very serious crypto privacy project. With so many new currencies and privacy coins, one will most likely ask with a bit of a yawn “what makes pirate any more special?” Let’s dig in.

Pirate is the most private cryptocurrency to date:

Unlike any other cryptocurrency currently available, Pirate’s entire blockchain is invisible, thanks to being encrypted by using zk-SNARK transactions for every transaction. This means ARRR is well future-proofed to the very determined chain analytics sector, something that no other project can say with confidence as it stands right now. Hopefully that will change in time and the competition that Pirate Chain brings will help drive the entire space to be the best it can be.

Let us look at the other two top privacy coins, Zcash and Monero, and give a quick comparison.

Edward Snowden when asked about his favorite cryptocurrency in early 2018 said this:

“W hen we talk about which cryptocurrencies are interesting to me, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, zcash for me is the most interesting right now, because the privacy properties of it are truly unique, but we see more and more projects that are trying to emulate this and I think this is a positive thing.” 1

This is because the technology in zk-SNARKs, which Zcash pioneered, is able to completely obfuscate individual transactions and protect them from even the most advanced technological snooping. But there is a catch, because Zcash also has a public ledger and most users tend to use public transactions, simple heuristics can be used to compare both ledgers and break anonymity. An academic paper written in May 2018 by a team at the University of London who was able to successfully use this technique to de-anonymize Zcash stated this:

“Ultimately, the only way for Zcash to truly ensure the size of its anonymity set is to require all transactions to take place within the shielded pool, or otherwise significantly expand the usage of it. This may soon be computationally feasible given emerging advances in the underlying cryptographic techniques” 2

So in effect Zcash possess a highly sophisticated and secure method of anonymizing transactions, but unfortunately fails in achieving privacy for its users by not enabling private transactions by default. They clearly know this, but most likely haven’t converted to 100% z-transactions because they are too enmeshed in major crypto infrastructure through the public chain to walk this back easily without creating some widespread compatibility issues. Not to mention the 20% founder reward on each block mined that the team relies on is going smoothly and makes it hard to wanna rock the boat to wildly. Lucky for us, Pirate Chain is here to solve this problem entirely by forcing private spend only with zk-SNARK tech…Snowden you onboard the Pirate ship?

Next up is Monero. Now Monero is good, it is the most used privacy coin to date, it too has forced private transactions which as we have learned is essential for blockchain privacy as we know it. But instead of completely breaking the digital footprint of transactions by encrypting it, like Pirate does, XMR attempts to obscure them through creating computationally difficult to trace transactions with a large set of possible senders and receivers for any one transaction. In other words, it is a complex form of coin mixing called Ring CT. It has proven to provide a good option for those who need privacy now. But it exposes itself to the omnipresent enemy of us all: Time. The problem here is that the transaction info is still available for anyone to see, and therefore subject to being de-anonymized by future improvements in chain analysis.

Although the Monero team has done a great job in staying ahead of that curve as much as possible, imagine thinking you are making an anonymous transaction only to find out 5 or 10 years from now that your transaction is now tied to your name. That can lead to a potentially more dangerous situation in that people might use less security thinking their private transactions will protect them indefinitely. This is something that has already occurred with Monero, in that most of the transactions made before 2017, which at the time were thought to be private, have now been traced successfully by analysts.

Given that Chainanalysis, the largest of many such companies devoted to de-anonymizing blockchain transactions, has raised $46MM in the last two years alone means that relying on coin-mixing methods might not prove to be as private in the future as it seems now. For those who truly believe in online privacy it is important to have options. Relying on encryption for privacy has been the backbone of the internet’s security since its inception, yet initial attempts to implement it to obscure transactions ended up vulnerable because the way people would use it was unknown. Pirate Chain has taken lessons from both of these groundbreaking projects to navigate into some exciting uncharted waters, and it appears they have the wind in their sails.

Pirate is as secure against 51% attacks as Bitcoin:

This is because Pirate Chain is secured through Komodo’s dPoW which uploads a backup to the BTC blockchain every ten minutes, effectively making Pirate as hard to 51% attack as Bitcoin. With the explosion of mining equipment over the last few years we have seen many other up-and-coming PoW coins have been easily 51% attacked because of the relatively low funds needed to do so. Even with large established projects like Monero, we see them having to spend a lot of development effort and funds to battle large mining operations and their ASIC’s in order to ensure the chain’s security and/or decentralization. PoS and masternode coins, although promising, still don’t have the security track record that Bitcoin has and have oftentimes allowed for early investors to amass massive treasure-troves of a project’s currency. dPow is like a cheat-code that calls upon the King’s guard for protection, and has been an effective way to ensure world-class security and decentralized funds from the onset of a project.

These features alone give Pirate Chain a big advantage in this competitive space, yet there is more to share. Behind the developments is a world class team and a rapidly improving Komodo ecosystem both of which are committed to making Pirate Chain a serious contender for the top privacy coin. It is non-ICO, no premine, no founder fee, and community supported. This means there isn’t a big ‘ol stash of OG coins waiting to dump on your head at any moment like 90% of new projects these days. With the recent Sapling upgrade, transactions are as quick as a cannonball and take up only a fraction of the space as before. This will only continue to improve. Pirate is also ready for online merchant payments with a customized wordpress plugin gateway, further reducing need for men in the middle and creating real pathways for true p2p online commerce that is as close to exchanging physical cash as the internet has ever seen before. Not to mention the treasure of Tortuga on the horizon….

ARRR you curious yet? There are plenty of articles that go into more depth, so go forth and discover for yourself why Pirate is pioneering the privacy seas and fulfilling the vision that has been at the heart of cryptocurrency’s popularity and success from the very beginning.

Visit https://pirate.black to begin your quest, and despite whatever your initial feelings were about the name or ticker, I’m willing to wager a pretty penny you won’t forget them anytime soon ;)