Pirate Chain can be found on some limited exchanges such as Trade Ogre and MexC. These exchanges are generally trusted, but it does require you to create an account. Creating an account opens you to a lot of different tracking methods such as tracking your IP address, browser fingerprinting, or simply knowing the cluster of transactions that belong to your specific account.

That is why our Pirate Chain Wallet enables you buy / sell ARRR. You do not need to use the wallet functionality. Continue to use your existing wallet such as Pirate Chain Lite or Treasure Chest. You can still take advantage an exchange or swap your Bitcoin or other coins for ARRR.

How to buy / sell Pirate Chain (ARRR) coin anonymously?

Download our wallet and look at the "Exchange / Trade" tab. Select ARRR and the other coin you want to use to swap. We will then search all the various exchangers and return to you the best exchanges with the best prices. If you decide to do the trade, then send the coins you want to swap to the provided address and 15 minutes later you will receive the coin you want to buy in your wallet.

Why is this more private than using a central exchange?

You have no account, so the cluster of your exchanges cannot be tracked. There is no browser fingerprinting. And, the exchange is done over the Tor Network. Central exchanges like MexC and Trade Ogre do not allow Tor connections and they can browser fingerprint. As a result, this is much more anonymous.

Pirate Chain Treasure Chest wallet is the full-node reference implementation for Pirate Chain network. This wallet is designed to be used by highly technical people or people who want to mine. In general, it will use more disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. Normal users should download our Pirate Chain Wallet which is much faster and more private.

Why is Treasure Chest wallet slow?

Treasure Chest wallet is slow because it requires you to download, store, and verify the entire Pirate Chain blockchain. Using our Pirate Chain Wallet is much faster because it does not require this step.

Is Treasure Chest wallet more private than Pirate Chain Wallet?

No, a unique factor about Pirate Chain is that it is shielded by default. Since our lite wallet utilizes the Tor Network it is actually more private than Treasure Chest network. Transactional anonymity is maintained because everything is shielded by default and utilizing the Tor Network ensures no additional meta tracking can occur by looking at transaction broadcast graphs.

We are committed to building the most private and secure wallet that exists. In pursuit of that goal we have released full Tor onion routing for the Pirate Chain Wallet.

Pirate Chain already supports zk-SNARKs transaction shielding which is the best of the best privacy tech today. Shielding transactions means that a particular transaction is indistinguishable from any other transaction in the network.

Why is shielding not enough?

Shielding protects from blockchain analysis and in this sense Pirate Chain offers very good protection with a high anonymity set. However, there exists more information than what is in the blockchain that can reduce anonymity sets. For example, the most obvious is network meta data. Nodes in the network can determine what IP address is initiating a particular transaction and what time and block it is confirmed. This does not give them the complete pictures, but it gives them more of the picture, which is not good for privacy.

Why does the Tor network enhance privacy?

Tor network will make it so your IP address is not associated with any transaction. If your IP address is associated with a transaction and your IP can be traced back to your identity then you have lost a lot of privacy. The Tor network that is fully utilized by Pirate Chain Wallet will make it so your IP address is never associated with a transaction and therefore enhance your privacy.

Anonymity sets are central when discussing privacy. Basically, an anonymity set is the total number of people that have a characteristic we are looking for. In cryptocurrency that generally means the potential people that may be associated with a particular transaction.

Anonymity sets get reduced by filtering the total population using known data. For example, let's pretend a store has a camera at it's entrance, but not inside and 100 customers visited the store that day and one of them stole a box of cereal. We can reduce the anonymity set right away to 100 because know it must be one of the people that physically entered the store. Using the camera at the entrance, we can also reduce it by an additional 95 because 95 people did not carry a bag, etc, that would allow them to physically transport the cereal out of the store. So, based on this, we can narrow the possibilities to the 5 people that entered the store that day and who had the transport capacity to exit the store with the cereal. The anonymity set has been reduced to 5.

What is the anonymity set of a Pirate Chain transaction?

Due to the magic of zk-SNARKs the anonymity set of Pirate Chain is the total size of network participants. So, if there are 1 million users of Pirate Chain then, that is the anonymity set. This set will grow over time as more people use it. This is in contrast to other privacy technology like Monero mixins, which only provide an anonymity set of 16 that shrinks over time.