FAQ

Pirate Chain is a project about financial freedom. It provides 100% shielded z-z P2P transactions to preserve the privacy and anonymity of the user. It is run by a passionate community of volunteers.

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.

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 Bitcoin 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 others.

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.

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

The short answer is, 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 shielded z2z.

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.

Newly mined coins (coinbase transactions) go to a transparent address for supply auditability reasons. So the short answer is, yes.

"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."

"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"

ARRRmada is an ecosystem of all the businesses and organisations that accept ARRR.

It is a directory of retailers and service providers that have ARRR as a form of payment.

You can find out more at arrrmada.com

You can find all the scheduled work from Pirate Chain on our frequently updated roadmap.

Mining is the process of how blocks are created. Each new block locks in the last. In order to "undo" a block, you must be able to go backwards, remove that block, create a new one, and a new one to replace every block.

Since the more miners there are the higher the difficulty is to create a block, therefore miners secure the chain by making it harder to undo any part of it. It's a bit more technical than that, but that's the "simple answer".

zk-sNARKs (Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) refers to a proof construction where one can prove possession of certain information without revealing said information, and without any interaction between the two parties. Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself.

A 51% attack refers to an individual or group controlling 50% or more of the network hashrate of a proof-of-work blockchain. The individual or group is then able to prevent new transactions from being confirmed on the blockchain, which allows them to halt payments between some or all users.

This would also allow them to reverse transactions that were completed while they were in control of the network, which means that they could double-spend coins.

Every privacy protocol uses different mathematical cryptographic strategies to obscure transactions and addresses. These obscured values are hidden in a pool called an "anonymity set."

The larger the group, the harder it is to identify your transaction/address (think "needle in a haystack", the larger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle).

Pirate has the largest Anonymity Set of any cryptocurrency and it is perpetually growing. See the live report of Pirate's anonymity set size here https://anonset.dexstats.info/

Pirate believes in privacy by default, giving you the option to opt out of privacy.

You can proof your transaction by showing your viewkey. Although we do not recommend this.