(illustration courtesy of dreamtim)

Preamble

Ahoy Pirates! In this past month we have been working on creating a market maker for $ARRR trading. A new initiative for $ARRR based e-commerce is also underway. As a founding partner of the BPSAA, we have been contributing to the efforts of establishing the BPSAA as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

Project Update

$ARRR Market Maker

Why is a market maker important? Chicken or the egg. Many pirates prefer to hodl $ARRR, as such, we have a low market volume. Consequently the thin order books deter the traders from buying/selling $ARRR. Signficant size orders have to suffer a 10-20% slippage in price. We will be setting up a market maker that will facilitate trading. In the near term, we anticipate a boost to the price of $ARRR and in the mid term, with increased trading volume, we forecast that Pirate Chain will be more visible on coin data aggregation sites (coinmarketcap, coingecko). In the long term, our goal is to entice larger crypto whales to become traders and hodlers of $ARRR too.

Pirate Pay

Lootz together with Ratstang of CryptoCurrencyCheckout are building Pirate Pay, a private e-commerce solution (dubbed "z-commerce"). Pirate Pay will be instrumental for merchant adoption and onboarding of the masses. To donate, use the !arrrtip donate [amount] command on on Pirate Chain discord to support this initiative!

Past Weekly Meetings:

If you missed any of Pirate Chain's meetings in July, you can catch up on the news with these recordings from Lootz:  7/1/20,  7/8/20, 7/15/20, 7/22/20

Subatomic Swaps - Shurli Protocol

One click activatable SubAtomic Swaps for all operating systems are now available for download here.

Just download the archive matching your platform, extract and make a config.json file as explained here. Then start Shurli as explained in the ReadMe file.

SubAtomic Swaps are very exciting in the realm of privacy and decentralization. Grewalsatinder shares his updates in the komodo community chat. He is still looking for testers to try out the software. If you are interested, ping him in the Pirate Chain discord. We thank  Grewalsatinder, SHossain and JL777 and their continued efforts towards this important contribution.

Wallet Update

Pirate Mobile Wallet

Pirate mobile wallet is currently being ported to iOS. Although android phones take up almost 75% of cellphone market share, iPhones constitute a smaller but important 24% of marketshare. No other privacy cryptocurrency has a dedicated mobile wallet at this time. We are very excited to have brought the world's first dedicated mobile for a fully private digital currency.  We are anticipating the release within the month.

Conference

CoinFestUK 2020

CoinFestUK 2020 is currently scheduled to go on. DreamTim and CryptoRich will be representing Pirate Chain and the BPSAA one of the largest conferences in Europe. As a sponsor at CoinFestUK, Pirate Chain will be featured at a booth in the sponsors' exhibition hall. This event is free to attend. If you in or near Manchester, UK during October 23rd-25th, grab your free tickets online and go get some Pirate Chain swag!

Social Media

Hackernoon Publication: An Open Letter to Coin Center: Introduction to a Fully Private Zero-Knowledge Proof Digital Currency

We have a new article on Hackernoon! Last month, Coin Center published an article recommending governments include privacy features to upcoming centralized governmental cryptocurrencies. Recognizing the importance of privacy, Mr. Green and Mr. Valkenburgh recommended the usage of zero-knowledge proof cryptography to enforce anonymity. We published an open letter responding to the article, raising awareness of Pirate Chain, a free market-based, zk-SNARKS shielded digital currency that is at the top of the privacy sector.

Pirate is now on Mastodon

"Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These nodes are referred to as "instances" by Mastodon users. These servers are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different servers to interact with each other seamlessly.

Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, or Weibo, although it is distinct from them, and unlike a typical software as a service platform, it is not centrally hosted. Each user is a member of a specific, independently operated server. Users post short messages called "toots" for others to see, and can adjust each of their post's privacy settings. The specific privacy options may vary between sites, but typically include direct messaging, followers only, public but not listed in the public feed, and public and posted to the public feed.

Each operating server has its own code of conduct, terms of service, and moderation policies instead. This differs from centrally hosted social networks by allowing users to choose a specific server which has policies they agree with, or to leave a server that has policies they disagree with, without losing access to Mastodon's social network." ~ Wikipedia 

Check out our new social media site: https://mastodon.social/@arrr 

Interview with Komodo Unofficial

@KomodoPlatform Hey everyone check out this interview with @TheInfamousKata , Captain of @PirateChain , and donate to the i2p fundraiser if you can!! https://t.co/mIKRrvKrvQ

— Intergalactic Cat Diplomat (@Komodo4all) July 20, 2020

In this interview, Captain Draeth talks about I2P, how it will benefit Pirate Chain and the I2P fundraiser. They also discuss the intangible benefits that the mobile wallet will bring to Pirate Chain ecosystem adoption and to the world of private digital currency.

Pirate Chain review with Crypto Rich

Crypto Rich catches up with Captain Draeth from Pirate Chain twice inJuly. As well as an update on Pirate Chain developments, he gives an update on what is happening with the BPSAA. This incorporates Sentinel.co, Turtle Network, Ether1, and Ergo as well as Pirate Chain.

Part 1

Part 2 

Pirate Chain Partners

Pirate Chain is one of the founding members of the BPSAA. The mission of the BPSAA is to increase privacy and security in the blockchain space through collaboration between members and raising awareness amongst the public. Besides being an organization that charitably seeks to improve the state of privacy and security in the industry, the BPSAA will also foster an environment of interoperability between member tech stacks whilst practicing the principles of Privacy by Design in collaborative project.

Last Words from the editor

In the recent months, we have seen our cultural institutions besieged, more so now than ever before. In the past two decades, the brokers and consumers of big data have eroded our privacy through surveillance capitalism. Starting in the '90s, ramped up in 2000's and the machinery has been operating at full tilt in 2010's. This subtle subterfuge has been brought to light in the past couple of years by several social academics, particularly with the work of Dr. Shoshana Zuboff. (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, https://shoshanazuboff.com/book/) But I've written about this before. I want to talk about the threat that today's cultural motivations and reactionary political policies pose to our personal freedoms.

Privacy is a personal virtue that once lost is hard to retrieve. The toxic culture of doxxing a virtual verbal sparring counterpart over differing opinions is detrimental to the foundations of social privacy. Debates over social media are furnished with a thin veil of anonymity. In today's environment where emotions run high and opinions are expressed without regard for its impact on others, tit for tat retaliations very quickly devolve to doxxing.

Privacy is not as effective and difficult to achieve when only a handful of people want it. Just like vaccines, privacy is strongest as a social virtue when everyone seeks anonymity for themselves and seeks to become a society that values privacy. Social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are all masterminds in the criminal game of surveillance capitalism. Humanity is under attack by those who seek short term monetary gains feeding individuals the delusion of fame at the expense of the consumers' personal sovereignty over privacy.

Governments across the world are close to implementing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). There are many economical and geopolitical benefits to easily trackable digital currencies. However, once again, the first victim of CBDCs is privacy. Political parties have championed wanton surveillance as a means to buffer crime. The tracking capabilities of CBDCs will virtually wash away any personal privacy of its citizens. Did you buy a carton of cigarettes even though the state is paying for your oxygen treatment for COPD? Did you go to the casino even though you're on social welfare? Every financial transaction you make is available on the monitor with just 1 click.

These are reasons why we need to champion privacy as a society, as a humankind, together. Pirate is there with you. $ARRR is irrefutably the most anonymous digital currency. Pirate Chain continues to work tirelessly to protect your online activity with PirateOS, and to bring you a future where your in-person transactions can be anonymous through the use of Pirate Mobile wallet and the Pirate Point-of-Sale system.