FAQ

Pirate Chain is a project about financial freedom. Most privacy coins are riddled with holes created by optional privacy. Pirate Chain uses zk-SNARKs (military-grade encryption) to shield 100% of all peer-to-peer transactions on the blockchain, making for highly anonymous and private transactions.

In 2018, a group of privacy-focused developers came together to improve the code of existing cryptocurrencies. The result was Pirate Chain. There was no ICO, IEO, or presale. There is no dev reward/fee. The project is run by a passionate community of volunteers.

It's a common misconception that Bitcoin transactions are private. In fact, Bitcoin transactions are mostly public since it is an open ledger, which makes Bitcoin pseudonymous at best. Every transaction made reveals the balance of your wallet to the other party. It does not take any stretch of the imagination for large corporations to track you through your wallet transactions and vice versa.

In fact, this is so much easier than trying to track you through your credit card transactions as those are hidden on private centralized servers. Whereas with Bitcoin, the blockchain is broadcast globally. Even worse, nefarious actors can target you once they have identified your generous wallet balance. This public display of your financial status to the world is found not just in Bitcoin but also in every other cryptocurrency without native privacy. Financial privacy is paramount to individuals and business entities.

In today’s digital world, every action online is monitored and tracked. All financial transactions are at best recorded, or worse, hijacked by hackers for future illicit purchases. Privacy used to be the right to be left alone. Today it has morphed into the right to opt-out of giving away your personal information. Using Pirate Chain will restore privacy to your financial actions, giving you the right to opt-into sharing your personal details, which is a significant step forward for economic freedom.

The anonymity set concept is actually quite simple, despite its complicated name. The anonymity set is the number of people Waldo is hiding amid if you’re playing “Where’s Waldo.” The greater the number of people, the less likely it is to pick at random and make the proper choice. The anonymity set is exactly the feature which adds privacy to a privacy coin. Pirate currently has an anonymity set of about 600,000 (the anonymity set grows with every peer-to-peer transaction). This means you're able to hide among 600,000 other identical transactions, making this the biggest anonymity set in all of crypto.

Monero offers a private chain, but their privacy tech is inferior to Pirate's. Full-stack zk-SNARKs, which Pirate utilizes, offer better privacy than you would get with using Monero. So a fully shielded chain like Pirate offers better privacy, bigger anonymity set, and on top of that Pirate is also 51% attack resistant with the use of Delayed Proof-of-Work.

Zcash does not shield all of their peer-to-peer transactions, which ruins fungibility and privacy. Zcash utilizes transparent addresses and those transactions make up 98% of their chain. This is not private. Aside from initial block rewards from mining pools, all of Pirate's transactions are private. Pirate is also 51% attack resistant with the use of Delayed Proof-of-Work and has a much bigger anonymity set.

Whilst Proof-of-Work is a great consensus mechanism to verify transactions, blockchains that only utilize PoW with small levels of hashing security can be attacked as the market value of those blockchains increases over time with what is known as a 51% attack (double-spending attack). Delayed Proof-of-Work notarizes the transactions made on Pirate on to the Komodo blockchain, and then on to the Litecoin blockchain. This was added to make Pirate more secure than any other Proof-of-Work chain out there by being resistant to 51% attacks. This is what makes it special compared to the others.

Pirate OS is our series of operating systems that we are developing to enhance the security and privacy of those making transactions. Think of it as an environment to run your wallet with the peace of mind of all the security features in place without the exploits and bugs the other operating systems have, plus its transportable since it is burned onto a USB. You simply power down your PC, plug in the usb, then boot from the usb itself and the operating system comes up. This has the distinct advantage of having the ability to transport your wallet anywhere with the USB, while being able to use it on almost any computer. The OS has MAC address spoofing, runs over TOR, and will eventually have the data encrypted as well as run over several VPNs. This ensures that your wallet is safe, secure and virtually untraceable when you make transactions.

The reason why this is true is that ZCash does not shield all of their P2P transactions, which ruins fungibility and their privacy. Zcash utilizes transparent addresses and those transactions make up 98% of their chain. This is not private. Aside from initial block rewards to pools, all of our transactions are private. Also, we have a bigger anon set and use dPoW.

Monero offers a private chain, but their privacy tech is inferior to ZCash. Fluffypony himself stated that zk-SNARKs offers better privacy than Monero. So a fully shielded chain like ours offers better privacy, a bigger anon set and we are 51% attack resistant with dPoW.

We already solved the fungibility problem by shielding all of our P2P transactions.

Bitcoin is traceable. You can see exactly where everything goes, giving addresses linkability. If someone sends you bitcoin that came from a nefarious source, and the authorities know about it, you can be linked to that transaction. With Pirate, this cannot happen.

Pirate runs a couple Komodo Notary Nodes that donate funds to us every month, as well as having our main pools donate a portion of the pool fees to us. We profit by having these funds used toward development, community bounties, etc. We also raise funds from the community to help pay for things like exchange listings and more.

Specialized hardware is extremely efficient, and boast far more hash power, and thus security, per unit of electricity. They’re more reliable than home-built GPU miners, and allow miners to specialize, professionalize, and scale up. Additionally, ASICs are algorithm-specific, and could align miner incentives better with a specific project compared to GPUs, which are much more flexible. In a political vacuum, an ASIC-mined network is more efficient at processing blocks, plain and simple, and arguably more expensive to attack.

We decided just to embrace the ASICs, since they're here to stay and aren't going anywhere. On top of that, going through hard forks every few months just to combat them seems pointless and messy. So no, Pirate is not ASIC resistant.

With the sapling ceremony, there is really no issue with the trusted setup.

Read more on "Powers of Tau Ceremony" here:

- https://www.zfnd.org/blog/conclusion-of-powers-of-tau/
- https://www.coindesk.com/zcash-team-completes-powers-of-tau-ceremony-for-upcoming-hard-fork

Our main dev is MrLynch, who is absolutely brilliant, our core dev is jl777 who is also the lead developer of Komodo, radix42 who was one of the early BTC devs and she was also a Zcash dev, but is now a Pirate dev. ComputerGenie is one of our wallet devs, Wieprz is our PirateOS dev, and we have more devs that contribute from the Komodo ecosystem. We are always looking for more devs to fully round out our team though.

There is little to no compromise on anonymity. There is a small amount of metadata leakage to the insight server. The insight server will know the IP address associated with wallet transactions, based on the witnesses requested by the wallet. However, using a VPN would protect the user against that leakage.

Newly mined coins (coinbase transactions) go to a transparent address for supply auditability reasons.

"Even if 1 septillion ARRR existed, "the answer is that a cryptographic hash is used to publish a commitment to each created note, and the zero-knowledge proof ensures that for each JoinSplit transfer, the total amount specified in these commitments..."(plus the transparent output) matches the total amount spent from the inputs. The enforcement that the plaintext of notes is correct is done only when they are decrypted. In short, even if you make them in "secret" you cannot spend them because the numbers don't match and no one will accept the transaction." - ComputerGenie

"Pirate supply integrity is based on the coinbases mined and then reliance on sapling z -> z transactions not allowing to double spend or create new coins" - jl777

The main use case for Pirate is complete financial privacy. Nobody has a right to view your daily purchases, what you decide to buy, etc. Informational security and privacy is more important than most people realize. The benefit for holders is the knowledge of having their financial privacy secure and the ability to use Pirate in online shops (and eventually in person when we develop the Point of Sale system)

No.

The following link https://dexstats.info/richlist.php?asset=PIRATE only shows the unshielded mining rewards (which can still be shielded) and notarizations. Remember, there are only two exceptions for transparent transactions, which are the block rewards from mining and notarizations. All the other transactions are z2z.

"atomicDEX-API is a cross protocol. core layer
atomicDEX app is an app on top of the protocol core layer
komodod. is a cryptocoin daemon that PIRATE is based on

atomicDEX is. a totally separate thing than komodod daemon.

think about it this way. if some ETC (fork of ETH) dapp project adds KYC to their dapp, does. that affect the ETC daemon? does it affect the ETH daemon? PIRATE is independent chain in the komodo ecosystem. independence means it can. independently decide to do. things" - jl777