The transparency of transactions in the blockchain is a big problem that many crypto currencies want to solve.

There are numerous privacy coins, including Bitcoin Private. Bitcoin Private has good approaches and it is not my intention to make BTCP bad. That is far from me! But PIRATE makes it better and that’s exactly what I want to deal with in this comparison.

Before we go into this comparison, read our other comparisons to Monero and Verge.

Let’s start with the story of BTCP and ARRR first. Both Coins are relatively young. Bitcoin Private was released in February 2018, Pirate set sail in September of the same year.

BTCP is a hard fork from Bitcoin and ZClassic. The spin-off took place on 28 February 2018. A snapshot of all existing Bitcoin and ZClassic stocks was taken and the newly created Bitcoin Private was distributed in a 1:1 earth drop. For example, if you had held 0.7 BTC and 150 ZCL at the time of the snapshot, you would have received 150.7 BTCP.

PIRATE is a Mining-Coin and originated from the community of Komodo. An assetchain that was initially intended for experimentation, because until then a coin had been missing that was absolutely anonymous and secure. So an experiment resulted in the most private coin of all crypto currencies at the moment.

Technology zk-Snarks

Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge

Both BTCP and ARRR use the zk-Snarks technology. Zero-Knowledge-Proofs enables two parties to carry out an anonymous transaction with each other.

With zk-snarks technology, all payments are published in the blockchain, but the transactional metadata that can identify the sender and recipient cannot be read.

But while Bitcoin Private gives the user the choice of generating a public or private address, Pirate’s addresses are forced to be private. And this is exactly where the difference lies. Data protection in BTCP is optional, i.e. parts of the blockchain are transparent. Whereas Pirate is completely anonymous. Only 0.01 % are transparent addresses. These are t-addresses from the mining industry, which carry out all their transactions in z-addresses.

delayed Proof of Work technology

Another important difference is the protection against 51% attacks. Bitcoin Private is like almost every old coin endangered to be hacked.

On 13 October, the ethical hacker Geocold followed his promise to take over 51% of the hashrate of an Altcoin and initially opted for Einsteinium. However, Einsteinium had previously implemented Komodo’s delayed Proof of Work security mechanism. Geocold had to stop the attack and made it clear afterwards that dPoW could not be overcome. It was subsequently confirmed by another hacker (Forkwitch) who had tried in vain to take over Einsteinium’s network.

https://twitter.com/forkwitch

Finally, Geocold opted for Bitcoin Private (BTCP) and quickly gained control of the majority of the hash values. He had the 51%, but had to stop the attack because the streaming services had pulled the plug.

Geocold had proven that Bitcoin Private was vulnerable to 51% attacks.

This means that if the attacker took full control of a network, he could perform double-spending transactions. This means that he could reverse transactions and transfer them elsewhere, completely upsetting the network. He could prevent as many transactions as he wants or not assure them of any confirmations. The attacker could, for example, specifically block certain payments and thus deactivate individual participants. He could prevent any number of miners from mining any valid blocks and instead collect the rewards himself.

The potential damage would be immense!

Pirate is protected against 51% attacks

Pirate, as a child of the Komodo ecosystem, is safe. 51% attacks are not possible due to delayed Proof of Work (dPoW). dPoW prevents 51% attacks by additionally protecting Pirate with the Bitcoin-Hashrate.

In simple terms, dPoW is a service that stores a backup of its own chain on the Bitcoin ledger every 10 minutes. Attackers would first have to attack Pirate successfully. The attackers would then have to hijack the Bitcoin network, which is almost impossible today, as it is one of the most secure networks.

Conclusion

Both crypto currencies use advanced technology and algorithms. The transactions and thus the blockchain of Pirate are 99.9% anonymous, whereas Bitcoin Private does not offer forced anonymous transactions, but, as in Zcash, large parts of the blockchain are transparent. The Bitcoin Private brand name promises a lot, but the technology is no better than other optional privacy coins. In contrast, Pirates transactions are private by default, which encourages greater use of these transactions and provides more network security.