Hyperpiratechainization
Hyperpiratechainization (ARRRVID-20) is a piratechain induced fiat currency demonetization. Hyperpiratechainization is the voluntary transition from inferior and inflationary currencies to a superior and encrypted cybercoin; its adoption is a series of individual acts of entrepreneurship. The process of hyperpiratechainization is inexorable because the state cannot ban piratechain, i.e., restrict competition. Piratechain don’t care about borders. As long as there is at least one matey able to send and receive packets in a given country (or sea), the fiat currency of that country will eventually fall victim to hyperpiratechainization. Moreover, hyperpiratechainization does not depend on monetary and fiscal mismanagement — the exchange rates of fiat currencies can remain stable relative to each other — hyperpiratechainization will pulverize all of the exchange rates. Simultaneously. ARRR!
The Fungibility Narrative
“The multitude will certainly be seized by the common affection, and be governed by it in all their actions.”
— David Hume
Narratives are the most powerful force in the universe. In 2017, scalability was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. So powerful was this narrative that XRP, a centralized shitcoin, outperformed just about every asset ever within a 12-month period. Even bitcoin, in an attempt to appease the narrative, broke itself apart — with the dominant faction choosing to become an ICO for the lightning network.
The scaling narrative in the cybercoin space ultimately rose out of a fundamental problem — adoption was outpacing throughput at given block size limits. Likewise, the upcoming fungibility narrative in the cybercoin space will rise out of a fundamental problem — a lot of people still on the sidelines are unwilling to live in a glass house. The signature scheme used in bitcoin is ECDSA, which uses cleartext as opposed to ciphertext. In other words, bitcoin is a fully transparent blockchain, which poses many problems; chief among them is that it is missing a crucial component of money: fungibility.
Fungibility means that each unit of a good is perfectly interchangeable. This is impossible to achieve for a completely transparent blockchain like bitcoin — virgin coins are inevitably worth more than coins with a transaction history since the latter may have been used illicitly at one point (Back, 2018). The current “solution” used by bitcoiners is to use a new address per transaction and to constantly mix coins in pools. While these steps add noise, which makes it harder for the plebeians to map the blockchain, they are useless against machine learning algorithms designed specifically to subtract noise. Moreover, the blockchain is permanent, which means that even if entities currently do not have the tools to map out the entire chain, they eventually will. Today, the blockchain may only be 86% mapped. Tomorrow, 100% (Chainalysis Team, 2018).
Satoshi Nakamoto had no choice but to use the ECDSA signature scheme because, until recently, the only alternative would have been to use RSA. The problem with RSA is that it would make transactions several orders of magnitude larger. This means that, instead of the bitcoin blockchain being 350 gigabytes today, it would be at least several terabytes, significantly hurting decentralization and therefore security. Moreover, it is unknown whether the market would have trusted the supply auditability of an encrypted cybercoin at the time — bitcoin was new and experimental enough to begin with.
Satoshi (2010) addressed the use of ECDSA early on, as he was repeatedly asked to include a memo field for transactions:
“I very much wanted to find some way to include a short message, but the problem is, the whole world would be able to see the message. As much as you may keep reminding people that the message is completely non-private, it would be an accident waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, ECDSA can only sign signatures, it can’t encrypt messages, and we need the small size of ECDSA. RSA can encrypt messages, but it’s many times bigger than ECDSA.”[1]
It wasn’t until several years later, in 2014, that a bunch of absolute gangsters came up with a feasible alternative to RSA: zk-SNARKs (Ben-Sasson, et al., 2014). Not only are zk-SNARKs significantly smaller than RSA, they are also state of the art zero-knowledge proofs. This means that transaction amounts, sender addresses, and recipient addresses remain hidden to third-party onlookers. Piratechain was the first to fully implement zk-SNARKs in a chain that enforces shielded peer-to-peer transactions when it launched in 2018 — making the entire piratechain supply completely fungible (Draeth, et al., 2018). And yes, piratechain also has the fully encrypted memo field that people were bugging Satoshi about early on.
It is thanks to zk-SNARKs that piratechain contains the crucial fungibility characteristic of money not present in previous cybercoins. Although there are a number of other cybercoins that claim to be fungible, they are either phony, mostly transparent, or are missing one of the other characteristics of money. Like bitcoin, the vast majority of blockchains use transparent addresses (“t-addrs”) — meaning all transactions are fully transparent (“t2t”). In contrast, piratechain uses only shielded addresses (“z-addrs”) — meaning all transactions are fully shielded (“z2z”).
While Zcash (a fork of bitcoin) also has z-addrs, most of the Zcash blockchain consists of t-addrs with a transaction history, i.e., most of the Zcash supply is not fungible. Evolutionarily, such a system is bound to be inconsequential and short-lived.
fish ➟ amphibian ➟ mammal
ICE ➟ hybrid ➟ EV
t2t ➟ t2z2t ➟ z2z
bitcoin ➟ Zcash ➟ piratechain
As you can see by the table, bitcoin much smell — piratechain no smell.
Hyperpiratechainization is inevitable for the same reason that the rise of HTTPS was inevitable. When it comes to HTTP, data (such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) are sent unencrypted (cleartext) over the internet, which allows for man-in-the-middle attacks. This is completely unacceptable. Only a fool would give his or her information away over an HTTP website.
Throughout the 1990s, as the internet was being commercialized, people realized this was a major issue, and thus HTTPS was developed, allowing data to travel encrypted (ciphertext). In the early days, there was some political backlash against HTTPS, with some fearing that it would aid terrorism. Today, not only is HTTPS ubiquitous, it is required by law for banks, financial institutions, social networks, and e-commerce sites. Interestingly, one of the main reasons HTTPS didn’t become ubiquitous even faster is because, initially, HTTPS was significantly heavier. However, as time went on, the speed and throughput of the internet improved and HTTPS became lighter, which made it more feasible at scale.
The good news is that bitcoin is immutable. The bad news is that bitcoin is immutable. In other words, a decentralized system inevitably accumulates inertia and ossifies. The larger and older the system, the more inertia and ossification. This would be perfectly fine if bitcoin was good enough. Unfortunately, it is not good enough. Bitcoin is a beta product — it is HTTP. Piratechain is HTTPS. In a nutshell, piratechain is bitcoin but:
• encrypts all transactions (for complete fungibility)
• adds encrypted memo field (for sending sea shanties)
• adds viewing key (for selective disclosure)
• uses a memory-oriented mining algorithm (avoids competition with SHA-256)
• adds delayed proof-of-work (dPoW) from multiple blockchains (for additional security)
• has faster & bigger blocks (quicker confirmations & more throughput)
The Right to Privacy
“Cypherpunks seek to put into place structures which will allow people to preserve their privacy if they choose. No one will be forced to use pseudonyms or post anonymously. But it should be a matter of choice how much information a person chooses to reveal about himself when he communicates.”
— Hal Finney
The underlying point of piratechain is not that everything should be private. Rather, individuals should have control over how much they reveal, and to whom. In other words, piratechain provides users with the power to select which portion of their transaction history, if any, they disclose to various actors. Many haters will claim that piratechain is just for criminals. This is prejudice — block chains matter.
The importance of privacy may be demonstrated with the following real world example. Consider Stefan Molyneux, a banned YouTube philosopher. The transaction history of his bitcoin donation address is open for all to see. There are some terrible disadvantages to this. For one, people can know he has been sent several million dollars worth of bitcoin at current prices — something he may not want the world to know. On the one hand, if people think he continues to hold the cybercoin, then he becomes a target for marketers and perhaps even more nefarious forces that may bother him or his loved ones. On the other hand, if people think he sold the bulk at much lower prices, they may think he is foolish. Not only is his subsequent transaction history exposed, so are the addresses and the transaction histories of his donors — all of which can be mapped.
The right to privacy will continue to be under constant threat. For example, Australia, historically a testnet for the FVEY, recently passed an ambiguous but downright disgusting anti-encryption law that requires tech companies to provide backdoors so that the government can slide into all the DMs (Mcguirk & Bajak, 2018). More recently, India has been heading in the same direction (Murgia, 2019). Perhaps the most egregious violation of privacy is yet to come via the social credit system that China is rolling out — in no small part thanks to extracting data from private companies like Alibaba (Hatton, 2015). Some bitcoiners want you to think bitcoin will get Schnorr signatures, but they are smoking crack — bitcoin too ossified.
Money is ultimately a measuring stick — a benchmark with which to represent value. Therefore, the potential market capitalization of money is the total market capitalization of everything, including all goods, services, stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives, and real estate (physical and digital). Although the actual amount is unknown, it is estimated that the total value of all money and markets globally amounts to roughly $1.8 quadrillion (Desjardins, 2017). Thus, we arrive at a potential value of piratechain at $9 million per cybercoin.
$1,810,300,000,000,000 ÷ 200,000,000 piratechain = $9,051,500/ARRR
Please note that this is an extremely conservative figure. For one, the $1.8 quadrillion does not explicitly include labor, oil, and other important inputs that are only partially captured by stock markets. Moreover, it is possible that many private keys will be lost over time as the plebeians onboard, potentially amounting to 40 million departed piratechain cybercoins (Roberts & Rapp, 2017). This would put the value of 1 piratechain at over $10 million (or $0.10 per arrrtoshi). Furthermore, it is very likely that the value of assets, including many digital assets that do not yet exist, will be substantially higher in the future. Lastly, history suggests that fiat inflation will continue during the process of hyperpiratechainization. The long-term value of piratechain in terms of the USD shitcoin is precisely $∞ per cybercoin.
In the 1990s, we did not know for sure whether the internet would continue to grow. However, if it did, then the rise of HTTPS was logically inevitable. The same is true for the cybercoin market and piratechain. It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. Henceforth, if enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Works Cited
Back, A. (2018, 8 20). Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1031570649628770305
Ben-Sasson, E., Chiesa, A., Garman, C., Green, M., Miers, I., Tromer, E., & Virza, M. (2014). Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin. IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Oakland. Retrieved from http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf
Chainalysis Team. (2018, 12 19). Mapping The Universe Of Bitcoin’s 460 Million Addresses. Retrieved from Chainalysis: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/bitcoin-addresses
Desjardins, J. (2017, 10 26). All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization. Retrieved from The Money Project: http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/
Draeth, FishyGuts, jl777, & KOSIUS. (2018). The Pirate Chain Code V2.0. Retrieved from pirate.black: https://pirate.black/files/whitepaper/The_Pirate_Code_V2.0.pdf
Hatton, C. (2015, 10 26). China ‘social credit’: Beijing sets up huge system. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186
Mcguirk, R., & Bajak, F. (2018, 12 7). Australia anti-encryption law rushed to passage. Retrieved from Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-australia-anti-encryption-law-passage.html
Murgia, M. (2019, 1 16). WhatsApp to push back against Indian crackdown on encryption. Retrieved from Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/8adc2b8c-1a4a-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21
Nakamoto, S. (2010, 1 28). A newb’s test — anyone want to buy a picture for $1? Retrieved from bitcointalk.org: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25.msg159#msg159
Roberts, J. J., & Rapp, N. (2017, 11 25). Exclusive: Nearly 4 Million Bitcoins Lost Forever, New Study Says. Retrieved from Fortune: http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/
[1] More posts from Satoshi on this topic may be found here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25.msg173#msg173
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30.msg1169#msg1169 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1032.msg13221#msg13221
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1545.msg18250#msg18250
