Preamble
Happy New Year, Pirates! Let's hope for a refreshed and renewed 2021 that will be much better for all! After two and a half years of publications, we are changing the name of the newsletter to The Pirate Post. The last month of 2020 certainly was full of celebrations and surprises. Pirate celebrated its 3rd halving! We saw new all time highs in BTC and the stock market. We also celebrate a much deserved firstmate promotion. Read on for more details!
Project Updates
Pirate Chain Halving #3
On December 2nd, 2350hr UTC, Pirate Chain underwent its third halving event. Mining rewards were reduced from 64 to 32. Congratulations Pirates!
Team Updates
Crypto Rich Promoted to Firstmate
This promotion has been a long time in the making. Crypto Rich has been contributing to Pirate through his YouTube and Bittube channels regularly. He often interviews Captain Draeth sharing the latest exciting updates with his Pirate subscribers. Congratulations Crypto Rich!
Wallet Updates
Pirate Ocean v3.1.1 latest release
The team at Pirate is proud to announce the latest release of our full node wallet. Pirate Ocean v3.1.1 contains some big improvements and smaller bug fixes, all of which will make the speed up the wallet and make it easier to use.
Here are the highlights of this release:
1-Click wallet install
Downloads blockchain bootstrap on new installs (or bootstrap=1)
Downloads network parameters automatically
New Features
- Changed komodod to pirated
- Changed komodo-cli to pirate-cli
- Used PIRATE by default for acname when using pirate-cli
- Detects imported sampling keys and set wallet birthday to 1
Feature Revisions
- Revised rescan function to only call BuildWitnessCache on blocks that contain transactions belonging to the wallet
- Revised log spam on deletetx
- Increased deletetx interval from 1000 to 10000 blocks during rescan and initial download
- Changed app name from Pirate Wallet to Pirate Ocean
- Removed soft set parameters activating deletetx and consolidation by default
- Updated decompose transaction in QT GUI
- Updated macrelease.sh to no longer include network param scripts
- Misc Code Cleanup Bug Fixes
- Displays mined transactions with the correct categorization
- Wait to notify UI of a new transaction during rescan to prevent UI lockup
- Fixed Typos
- Uses non-versioned volume name for MAC releases
- Fixed Signature Readme for GPG release signatures
Download the wallet here: https://github.com/PirateNetwork/pirate/releases/tag/v3.1.1
New video tutorial on how to create paper wallet
Kaks produced a video tutorial on how to create a paper wallet on windows and linux. A paper wallet is one of the safest methods for long term cold storage of cryptocurrencies. Watch this video to learn how to create your own paper wallet here,
https://bittube.tv/post/786c87ec-05d8-4388-8f25-d530afb45720
Pirate Pay Updates
PiratePay is a fully decentralized, open source payment gateway that allows you to accept Pirate Chain ($ARRR) on your websites and stores. Built inhouse and optimized for privacy, PiratePay removes the need for a middleman and is built with the utmost level of security in mind.
Learn how to set up Pirate Pay for your store here.
**There is currently a 1000ARRR Bounty for stores that install and test Pirate Pay. The first 5 merchants that set up Pirate Pay for their website just has to ping @!Loo✟z#2749 on discord to receive the bounty.
Weekly Meeting Recordings
https://mixlr.com/cryptoradiolive/showreel
Special Meeting: https://soundcloud.com/cryptoradio/raf-da-green
- December 2nd, update with Lootz on current Pirate privacy ecosystem projects in development.
- December 9th, interview with Qortal.
- December 16th, interview with buidl1, developer of the third party wallet zundernet (available for beta testing).
- December 23rd, interview with Incognito. In this session, we learn about the Incognito platform service that aims to provide privacy to blockchain projects by wrapping client projects with their p-tokens.
- December 30th, interview with Goose and Coastline. Goose talks about the software service he built that facilitates trading on BTDex right from Discord. This revolutionary service is open source and allows users to trade from the desktop and mobile versions of discord. Also in this session, Coastline shares some of the updates on the Pirate website on the I2P network.
Social Media
CryptoVigilante Interview with Lootz and Crypto Rich
This is a must watch. I highly recommend all Pirates take some time to listen to this interview.
First mate Crypto Rich with Dollar Vigilante
PRIVACY + PIRATE CHAIN - DEEP DIVE WITH THE CRYPTO VIGILANTE – 1 OF 2
"Rafael La Verde is the head of the Crypto Vigilante newsletter. This is part of Jeff Berwick's Dollar Vigilante newsletter. In a previous video we discussed Bitcoin SV. Lootz, is like me, one of the community at Pirate Chain. Here, Rafael and I discuss the importance of privacy and Pirate Chain. (ARRR) ARRR claims to be the most secure and private of all the cryptocurrencies. Just as The Dollar Vigilante recommended Monero to its subscribers when XMR was mere pennies, due to its then superior privacy features, it is now recommending ARRR, for its superior privacy features. We discuss in this deep dive the features of ARRR and what makes it so special."
https://bittube.tv/post/ada2113e-becc-4f3a-a713-308a423686ff
https://bittube.tv/post/aa099ffb-2183-42fc-9832-890bb6a6d095
Crypto Vigilante talks about Pirate Chain
In the middle of an interview about Monero, Rafael LaVerde talks extensively about Crypto Vigilante's love of Pirate Chain and its superiority to Monero.
"Pirate Chain is objectively more private than Monero" ~ Rafael LaVerde, Crypto Vigilante
Captain Draeth with Crypto Mosin
Draeth talks about Pirate Chain and BPSAA at AtomicDex Stress Test live hour
Merchant/BPSAA Updates
Dragonchain joins BPSAA
On December 10th, Dragonchain joined the Blockchain Privacy and Security Adoption Alliance (BPSAA) as its 8th and newest member.
Known initially as the Disney Private Blockchain Platform, Dragonchain was incubated at Disney’s Seattle offices from 2014-2015. The code was publicly released as open source in 2016 and the project was publicly launched as an ICO in 2017. Dragonchain offers Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) prioritizing security and scalability. As a BaaS provider, Dragonchain aims to provide a frictionless transition for companies entering the blockchain industry. Designed by a team seasoned entrepreneurs and skilled developers, Dragonchain enables businesses to build and deploy their own blockchains within minutes. More importantly, clients do no have to change their existing software infrastructure.
An intentional design of Dragonchain is to provide the seamless integration into existing business workflows. To achieve a flexible blockchain solution, core goals of Dragonchain include
- Ease of integration with existing systems
- Ease of development for traditional engineers and programmers unfamiliar with blockchain, distributed systems, and cryptography via the use of containerized smart contracts
- Modular architecture (flexible and expandable for unforeseen applications)
- Protection of private business data by default
- Currency agnostic (multicurrency support)
The Dragonchain ecosystem is comprised of 3 pillars, the Blockchain, the Academy and the Foundation. The Academy provides a training framework that allows students to develop skills based on their needs and level of experience. The Dragonchain Foundation, a non-profit corporation, represents the ownership, responsibility, and maintenance of the Dragonchain open source code. The Foundation has expanded its role to include focus on education, advocacy, and adoption in the blockchain space, with emphasis on imparting the integral role Dragonchain plays toward these aims.
The BPSAA is at its core, a think tank. The founding members, Pirate Chain, Turtle Network, Sentinel and Ether-1 established the alliance based on a shared desire to collaboratively improve the blockchain ecosystem. Dragonchain joins the cadre of new members including Ergo, Komodo and Burstcoin as the latest member. In addition to the increased brain trust, there are numerous mutual benefits with Dragonchain’s addition. First, Dragonchain has a strong interest and privacy and interoperability, both key values to the BPSAA. Second, Dragonchain’s experience in enterprise solutions will be greatly beneficial to all members of the alliance. As an added benefit, the combined social media reach of all BPSAA members totals 317,000 with the addition of Dragonchain strengthening the united voice of the BPSAA.
Last word from the editor
A Currency for the People, not for Wall Street
The grassroots cypherpunk movement that gave birth to Bitcoin intended for BTC to be a censorship resistant and immutable, fungible currency for the everyday person.
Today, increasing numbers of Wall Street institutions are hopping on the bandwagon and shouting for everyone to buy cheap BTC at $20k. Household names such Square, Paypal and Mass Mutual are proclaiming their love for BTC from the mountain tops. Michael Saylor of Microstrategy is probably one of the loudest voices in this space. Notably, Michael is also one of the first to denounce the privacy and censorship resistance aspects of BTC.
As we know, the immutability aspect of BTC is an important feature. Vital to this is its transparent public ledger. Every transaction and every address is on a database that is replicated and verified by every node in the world. However, this lack of privacy makes it a terrible medium of exchange. Sure, no one would care if you bought burger and fries for lunch everyday. However, your health insurance company not renew your insurance if they know that you’re not a heart healthy diet while they are covering 90% of the costs for your cholesterol and blood pressure medications. The government probably doesn’t care that you bought a watch from someone on craigslist, but would you want that person to know that your wallet has a $100k balance on it?
Privacy is a critical feature of everyday money. Cash is the king of anonymity. Credit card transactions today have some pseudonymity imparted by the firewall of the credit card company. Some BTC developers are furiously trying to build a privacy layer on top of Bitcoin. In the meantime the BTC maximalists are already feverishly proclaiming the privacy that these unfinished products will impart to Bitcoin.
Wall Street does not like the privacy aspect because Wall Street makes money on its flow. It matters more to Wall Street that $100 billion worth of transactions are conducted in BTC valued at $10k, than $1 billion worth of transactions valued at $100k. While companies like Microstrategy enjoy seeing their BTC reserve assets grow with increasing BTC price, Wall Street earns its keep not by hodling, but by making money as the middleman. Wall Street also needs regulatory approval, and (as we have seen) governments will never condone private currencies that they cannot control. The latest FinCen regulations have already sparked the outrage of privacy concerned groups. Regulations will likely outlaw any private usage of BTC. This will inevitably create an environment of colored coins, effectively splitting BTC into a class system of "white-listed" vs. "colored" bitcoins. Want to use BTC in government regulated environments? Well, only white-listed ones will be allowed. Want to store your BTC privately? Well, you will only be able to use it outside of countries that ban unregistered addresses. Alex Gladstein, a champion of human rights and Bitcoin maximalist, laid out his thesis on the NLW podcast (1).
It is inevitable that Bitcoin becomes a speculative tool of Wall Street, in a two class system of registered and unregistered Bitcoin addresses. Bitcoin will also always retain its transparency that is required for its immutability.
Returning to the original intent of a currency for the people of the world, privacy coins are the closest iteration. Digital currencies with mandatory privacy such as Monero (2) and Pirate Chain (3) are the only two plausible options that can function as currencies for global citizens.
References
- NLW Podcast. Will Wall Street Ruin Bitcoin. December 16th, 2020.
- https://www.getmonero.org
- https://piratechain.com
Pirate Chain Anonymity Set
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LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/piratechain
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