(Graphic courtesy of dreamtim)
Preamble
Ahoy, Pirates! I hope this message finds you, your family and friends safe in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak. Since our last update, we have seen the the virus become a pandemic and spread rapidly throughout Europe and America, and witnessed the largest pullback of economies since the 1920s. While the immediate effect of social distancing is slowing the spread and potentially "flattening the curve", it has severely affected small businesses and livelihood of many around the world.
Initially, the blow was thought to be a severe double whammy of abrupt supply and demand cessation. To a certain extent, this is fortunately now mitigated to less of a supply issue as China's economy and production seems to be ramping back up. Time will tell how the demand side will play out as the European infection rate continues to increase while the United States' numbers is still at least 2-4 weeks behind them.
If any Pirate out there needs somewhere to talk or if being isolated at home is driving you crazy, I want you to know that our discord and telegram channels are always open, and we always have a bottle of rum to share with fellow Pirates and friends. Pirate Chain has and will continue with developments throughout this turbulent times. Amongst the many announcements this month about the most private cryptocurrency, we have a major delivery to share with you.
Project development
$ARRR is listed on Turtle Network DEX
Pirate Chain and Blockchain Privacy, Security & Adoption Alliance (BPSAA) founding partner, Turtle Network are proud to announce the listing of $ARRR on Turtle Network DEX. This is all thanks to hardwork and sponsorship of Wolf and the Gateway Service provider.
This is a functionally advanced exchange allowing you to trade $ARRR with any other coin on the DEX. True to the ethos of Privacy with Pirate Chain and BPSAA, there is absolutely no KYC. Trading is efficient with volatility facilitated by market makers providing deep liquidity.
Unlike many self-proclaimed "decentralized exchanges", with Turtle Network DEX you always retain custody of all your assets. The trading environment is full of useful, high demand features. Perhaps the most impressive element is the ability to trade any coin with $ARRR, there are no pair restrictions on Turtle Network DEX!
Samurai made a video guide on how to deposit your ARRR for trading on Turtle Network DEX,
https://bittube.tv/post/44c6f259-8f79-48ac-bf46-862172f16f34
This $ARRR listing on a truly decentralized exchange is a significant advancement for the privacy ecosystem of Pirate Chain, Turtle Network and the BPSAA.
Trading is live! Test out the open beta of Turtle Network DEX!
https://wallet.turtlenetwork.eu/
Komodo ecosystem NN Elections
What is the Komodo Notary Node election? As many Pirates know, Pirate Chain has a very unique blockchain security system known as delayed Proof-of-Work (dPow). Briefly, dPoW is a network of 64 Notary Nodes that validate the blockchains of any assetchains in the the Komodo ecosystem. The indexed blockchains are stored on Komodo's blockchain and ultimately onto Bitcoin's blockchain. Hence, any nefarious intent against Pirate Chain would first have to overcome the network activity of both Komodo and Bitcoin.
As you can see the Notary Nodes serve a very important function. The Notary Node operators are rewarded for their time and expenses. Notary Nodes are re-elected every year.
The voting process is fairly simple: on April 13, the Komodo team will airdrop VOTE tokens to all KMD holders at a 1:1 ratio to the KMD coins they hold in a private wallet. VOTE tokens are used to vote for Notary Node operators. In this past year, Pirate Chain has had it's own Notary Node with rewards going towards development and marketing funds. There were also several Pirate-affiliate Notary Node operators who donated a portion of their rewards to Pirate Chain.
This year, in addition to Pirate Chain's primary Notary Node, we also have a number of Pirate-affiliate Notary Node operators, MrLynch, Draeth, ComputerGenie, Lootz, Oszy, CHMEX, Strob, NutellaLicka
Find out more about the 4th annual Notary Node elections here,
https://komodoplatform.com/fourth-annual-notary-node-election/
Read the platform pitches of all the candidates here,
https://github.com/KomodoPlatform/NotaryNodes/tree/master/season4/candidates
Pirate OS
GhostShip OS, the first iteration of Pirate's Operating System has been released onto the high seas for 3 months now. This is a basic version, with all kinds of potential sources of tracking stripped down. Download it from here and give it a try!
https://github.com/PirateNetwork/PirateOS/releases/
Galleon OS, the upcoming feature-rich version of the Pirate Operating System is current under heavy development. The security architecture will be significantly improved with many customized options. This updated package will include many more privacy features. The goal is to create a simple-to-use product that protects the user from all fronts. Every aspect will launch as private mode by default, you can choose to opt-out.
Wallet development
Mobile wallet
Thanks to Forge, our mobile dreams are coming true. A mobile wallet will allow us to use Pirate during conferences and festivals for demonstrations as well as for all Pirates and privacy-minded friends. Once completed, it will be really simple to store, send/receive $ARRR on a basic smartphone.
In fact, as Forge mentioned last week, "the hard parts are done"!
We're just working on the UX now! We're all eager anticipating the arrival of this mobile wallet as it will open up Pirate Chain a whole world of adoption opportunities.
Press
Hackernoon publication "What Should You Expect From a Truly Private Digital Currency"
We published an article on Hackernoon in March. In this article, we reviewed the history of digital currencies from its first iteration in the 1980's until the birth of Bitcoin 30 years later. We address the urgent need for anonymity in personal financial transactions. We describe the historical progression of crypto projects in the privacy space and address how the marketcap leaders, ZCash and Monero played their part in the past. Importantly, we document how these older generation projects have led to the inevitable evolution of Pirate Chain as the most private cryptocurrency today. Take a few minutes to learn about the privacy sector in the cryptocurrency industry here,
https://hackernoon.com/what-should-you-expect-from-a-truly-private-digital-cash-u0g732gm
Social Media
TikTok
Pirate Chain is now on TikTok! Thanks to Teardrop, Pirate has a TikTok account! Follow us for announcements and look out for fun giveaways upcoming! Ping @Teardrop on discord if you have any novel content you'd like to see on Pirate TikTok!
Buccaneer twitter bot has been very successful since launch, rewarding our Pirate twitter community with every tweet tagging @PirateChain or $ARRR. As the mining rewards have halved, tweets are now rewarded with 2.77 ARRR
YouTube
CryptoRich price TA with Amir Ness
In this interview last month, CryptoRich looks at the price action for Bitcoin, Pirate Chain and Ethereum and Pirate Chain. Together with Amir Ness, he analyses the price action of the most private cryptocurrency, $ARRR.
CryptoRich followup interview with Amir Ness
In this second interview with Amir, Crypto Rich discusses the price action of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Gold and Silver commodity prices. CryptoRich reviews the impact of the stolen ARRR from the Altsbit hack. CryptoRich believes that the majority of the stolen coins were selloff around the last halving causing negative impact on the price. More importantly, he and Amir present that since the selloff, the price has taken steady steps finding support on the 20 day moving average.
https://bittube.tv/post/e32c350f-feb1-4441-8f09-d43218484065
Mineyourbiz Interview with Draeth
Draeth had a sitdown chat with Seth Estrada of mineyourbiz to talk about the state of privacy today. In this video, they discuss the beginnings Pirate Chain and review the highlights from the myriad of developments that have led up to where $ARRR is today. Draeth reveals some of the exciting developments in the near future that's on the roadmap.
"I was pleasantly surprised by what I learned during our conversation!" - Seth Estrada
Conferences
CoinfestUK
Pirate Chain is an official sponsor ot CoinfestUK. Originally scheduled for this month, the event has been postponed to November due to the current pandemic. Our Pirate Chain team are looking at the postponement positively as having more time to for ongoing developments to come to market. We are looking forward to showing off the most private cryptocurrency, $ARRR along with the accompanying suite of products that will hasten adoption at the end of 2020!
ARRRmada News
ARRRmada.com, which is comprehensive emporium of merchants accepting ARRR as payment, has been making waves! We are happy to announce a new business joining the ARRRmada!
Kryptika.net
Kryptika.net is a Crypto Platform, which offers various services and merchandising articles through its own shop. From Mining Hardware, Pools, Asic-Hosting, up to Wallet and Exchange offers as well as T-Shirts, Sweaters and others.
Checkout their page on The ARRRmada! https://arrrmada.com/kryptika/
Members of BPSAA
For the next few months, in place of the merchant/social media influencer-of-the-month section, we will introduce each BPSAA member and highlight some of the ongoing collaborative efforts. We got a glimpse of the important work of Turtle Network last month, which led us to the Turtle Network DEX announcement in this issue. In this update, we will learn a little about another founding partner of the BPSAA, Sentinel.
About Sentinel
Seventh, a community developer, introduces Sentinel
"Simply put, Sentinel is a decentralized virtual private network (dVPN) provider for both individual and enterprise use. We are driven by our primary goal of 'Providing superior privacy and security at a lower cost than any traditional provider.'
Specifically, regarding Pirate, the Sentinel team has been busy working on a custom Pirate-branded dVPN. The developers at Sentinel are rebuilding their desktop client and back-end networking. Once completed, Sentinel will even be able to integrate cross-chain payments. What's more, the Sentinel team is customizing its Linux client to provide a tailor-made version for the PirateOS.
We are very proud to reveal that this exciting product is nearly ready for general release."
Last words from the editor
I am sure we all have our opinions on what could have been done better in hindsight to manage the pandemic and the economy. Whether drastic social distancing measures is/was truly needed to mitigate the virus spread or whether it should have been started earlier, we may never know.
Many opportunists will take advantage of times of crises like now. Here are a few attacks on privacy at the present time:
1. Many countries have adopted draconian measures to track their citizens. Israel is the latest to join Iran and several Asia countries including China and South Korea in employing geolocation surveillance to track the movements of each and every citizen. As reported by the BBC, a Taiwanese citizen had tweeted,
"I did not expect two police officers to come knocking at my door at 08:15 when I was still asleep in my bed on Sunday morning.
My phone briefly ran out of battery at 07:30, and in less than an hour, four different local administrative units had called. A patrol was dispatched to check my whereabouts. A text was sent notifying that the government had lost track of me, and warned me of potential arrest if I had broken quarantine." (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52017993)
This is the stuff that we used to only watch in sci-fi movies. Governments have turned personal cellphones t0 act against their owners. Of course, one may argue that such measures are necessary during times of crisis. One may even naively assume good ol' governments will stop the wanton surveillance when the pandemic is over and not use it to monitor the movements of every citizen. That argument could perhaps be made about Singapore's tracking app which requires users to download now, and empowers them with the option to delete later. (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-24/coronavirus-singapore-trace-together) Only time will tell whether this surveillance will stop when the pandemic is over.
2. Numerous companies pivoted overnight to become institutional subscribers to Zoom for telecommunications. As it turns out, being a company based in China, all zoom conference data is sent to servers in mainland China. Moreover, the company is currently under fire for spying on conversations, and sending user data to Facebook without notifying them. (https://tinyurl.com/w7bn4zv)
3. During this time of crisis, the United States is trying to pass the EARN IT (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies) Act. It is proposed as a measure to protect against child pornography. However, according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.),
"This terrible legislation is a Trojan horse to give Attorney General Barr and [President] Donald Trump the power to control online speech and require government access to every aspect of Americans' lives,"
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EARN IT Act is "anti-speech, anti-security, and anti-innovation" and it is "unnecessary". (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/congress-must-stop-graham-blumenthal-anti-security-bill). This act "opens the door for the government to require new measures to screen users’ speech and even backdoors to read your private communications." (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/10/tech-companies-bipartisan-congress-encryption-080704). Bottomline, this act does nothing to protect against child pornography, but instead empowers the US Attorney General to mandate backdoors into the encryption of any messaging application.
Many have decried that Privacy is under attack. But this is not an overt war. Privacy is a fundamental faculty of humanity. It is rarely talked about and never taught socially or academicly in any culture. Unfortunately, modernity and technology has persistently chosen to prey on what is perhaps the weakest aspect of our human race.
When this pandemic is over, what will we have lost as a human race? Like all abtract challenges, there is not one panacea. This is about moving the pendulum or tilting the scale, one grain of sand at a time. As Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation has said, your money is your voice. Pirate Chain, as the most private cryptocurrency in the world, protects your privacy and empowers your voice.