While Monero Deals With A Potential 51% Attack, Is Pirate Coin A Better Option?

Last Updated on February 18, 2022

 Monero XMR, originally forked from Bytecoin, has recently come under scrutiny as the mining entity MineXMR has established a hashrate control of around 44% – coming dangerously close to the possibility of a 51% attack.

Pirate ARRR is one of the more prominent privacy coins on the market today. Pirate coin originated from the Komodo community and is protected against the 51% attack by using Bitcoin’s hashrate.

Pirate employs the delayed proof-of-work protocol which utilizes the enormous power of the bitcoin network to protect its blockchain from attack. Protection is achieved by storing backups of the Komodo (KMD) blockchain onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

Compromising the Bitcoin network is nearly impossible due to its secure network and its massively high hashrate. 

Some Monero Features

  • Monero uses a Ring signatures protocol called Bulletproofs, which makes analysis of Monero’s blockchain difficult.
  • The difficulty of identifying the actual sender is increasingly difficult with bigger ring sizes.
  • The ring size is the total number of possible signers, including yours, which in turn determines the complexity and difficulty of finding the actual ledger data.
  • Forced usage of ring signatures with un-linkable public keys allows Monero to be more fungible compared to protocols containing the usage of transparent addresses.
  • In crypto, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable

I wrote an article on how to obtain Monero XMR with the Ledger hardware wallet – and you will need another cryptocurrency in order to exchange for Pirate, so there are definite layers of complexity involved.

Business venture: The on-ramp to privacy coins is definitely an interesting market opportunity.

Graphic courtesy of: @flexatron

Why Fungibility Is Important

Cryptocurrencies that don’t have a history of transparent transactions on its blockchain is what enables you to conduct private transactions.

Yet, attempting to execute private transactions on a transparent chain can damage the fungibility of the currency. Activity on the blockchain can reveal that someone attempted to mix coins, which could be considered money laundering, or you could receive coins that have been masked as laundered.

This brings fungibility risks, such as, the possibility of blacklisting coins or potentially degrading the value of the coins.

Disturbing Development For Monero

Recently, the Monero community highlighted that the hashrate control of MineXMR is around 44% and concerns are growing as the mining pool is close to controlling over half of the network hashrate.

In contrast, ARRR is protected against the 51% attack through Bitcoin’s hashrate and compromising the Bitcoin network is nearly impossible due to its secure network and its massively high hashrate. 

Pirate ARRR Features

  • Transaction Privacy: When you go to the block explorer of Pirate Chain, you can see the transaction and fee, but not the sender’s and the receiver’s address or amount.
  • Mining of Pirate Chain coin is private, and how much is mined per address on the block explorer is not disclosed.
  • No data is compromised while transacting, mining, or purchasing ARRR, and wallet stores are not revealed.
  • Maximum supply of Pirate Chain coins is 200 million.
  • Zn-SNARKs: Pirate is the first crypto asset to use the Zn-SNARKs – Zero Knowledge-Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, one of the industry’s most robust privacy protocols.
  • Bitcoin Hashrate: Pirate Chain relies on the BTC Hashrate – the bigger the hashrate the less likely a network can be hacked

Buying Pirate Coin

  1. Have Bitcoin or Ethereum.
  2. Find the BTC/ARRR or ETH/ARRR pair on your exchange of choice, enter the amount you want to exchange or the amount of ARRR you want to buy.
  3. Confirm transaction.
  4. This is a decent article with answers to many FAQs in how to obtain Pirate coin.

Pirate Coin Roadmap

  • Read more about The Pirate Chain here.
  • They are getting ready for new exchange listings, additional marketing and interviews.
  • Planning to onboard more merchants into ARRRmada – a listing of places Pirate is accepted.
  • Consider collaborations with more privacy-oriented organizations.
  • Integrate Atomic DEX.
  • Attend more tech, privacy, cryptocurrency, and freedom events.
  • Update the ARRR whitepaper.