Whenever we send bitcoin from our wallet to one of our friends, use it to pay somewhere or send it to an exchange, the transaction is stored on a public ledger, visible to anyone. While one might claim that you can’t track down a public address to a natural person, this has often been proven wrong especially with increasingly sophisticated tools for chain analysis.
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” — Edward Snowden
Often times people wrongly assume that cryptocurrencies can maintain their privacy. This is only partly true for most of them. However, have you ever thought about what it means for a currency to have a fully transparent track record? Where would our society go if all your financial transactions are publicly available?
These and other questions have been driving forces behind the development of Pirate Chain, a truly decentralized and private cryptocurrency.
Pirate Chain was born as an experiment out of the Komodo Blockchain community. In 2018 they started wondering if a cryptocurrency with enforced z-transactions could work.
To understand the implications of that, we need to have a look at other privacy coins. One of the most famous privacy coins monero is using RingCTs to enable privacy. In comparison, Pirate Chain is enabling privacy with ZK-snarks, a technology that offers better privacy than any crypto built with RingCTs. And even another privacy currency with ZKsnarks like Zcash is not as anonymous as Pirate Chain, since they allow t and z-transactions, meaning users can choose if they want to transfer privately or not.
With enforced z-transactions, every transfer of value within that chain is absolutely private. Within one day the Komodo community recognized the potential of their truly private cryptocurrency and soon found a name for it with Pirate Chain. Pirate Chain because all Pirate developers, contributors and supporters are Pirates of Privacy. They don’t want to have anything to do with Piracy.
Pirate Chain is on a mission to “preserve financial privacy in a world dominated by transparent transactions”.
Grown out of the Komodo Blockchain Community, Pirate Chain is an independent asset chain of Komodo using an EquiHash PoW algorithm in combination with the delayed PoW of komodo. Without going into too many technical details, delayed PoW basically allows blockchains to leverage the bitcoin blockchain to enhance their own network security. This makes it very difficult for an attacker to hack dPoW chains.
To maintain privacy, Pirate Chain uses zk-snarks, which rely on zero-knowledge-proofs. With Zero-Knowledge-Proofs it’s possible to confirm that a transaction has happened without revealing any other information about it.
Pirate Chain is the infrastructure for their native token $ARRR which works like other cryptocurrencies as a way to transfer value from one network participant to another.
Pirates that want to hide their IP address can also use the TOR browser to do so, as Pirate Chain supports TOR.
Since the launch of $ARRR and Pirate Chain in 2018, the community has grown into a global community of Pirates that all work together in a decentralized manner on growing the Pirate Chain ecosystem and to build tools to make it easy for anyone to transact in private.
Pirate Chain Listing
Pirate Chain will be listing on Bitcoin.com Exchange on February 14th 21:00 UTC with BTC and BCH base-pairs.
If you want to learn more about Pirate Chain, check out their website. They also have a very welcoming and friendly community that’s always happy to help newbies understand what they’re doing in their fight for privacy.