DASH vs PIRATE (ARRR)

A technical comparison between strongly named and highly valued privacy centered cryptocurrency DASH and the strongly upcoming private cryptocurrency PIRATE.

Published in

Pirate Chain

6 min readJan 6, 2019

It is time for the 4th installment of the “Pirate VS. series” with the one and only DASH cryptocurrency!

DASH is well known as the pioneer of the Masternode technology with a whopping number of 4871 active Masternodes which enable their decentralized governance structure for funding projects and other functions. Furthermore, it currently boasts a 12th spot at CoinmarketCap with a 700M dollar marketcap.

DASH

DASH is a litecoin fork starting out as early as january 2014 while it was still named Xcoin. Later it would brand to Darkcoin and back then it used to have a negative connotation in the media as a darkweb coin. The third and final rebrand gave birth to the more mass-appealling name “DASH”, short for Digital Cash.

Currently, DASH focuses their branding more on the ease of use of crypto for the mainstream folks with shorter confirmation times.

I will go briefly into all of DASH’s aspects and will dive a bit deeper in the privacy aspect of the coinc.

Governance structure

DASH is foremost proud of their “decentralized governance structure” also referred to as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO. 1/10th of DASH’s block rewards go to an “escrow” within the blockchain of which the purpose of the funds can be voted on by the masternodes. Masternodes ofcourse need an incentive to run and as such block rewards are split as follows:

Mining reward for Proof-of-Work: 45%
Masternode reward for Proof-of-Service: 45%
Decentralized governance budget: 10%.

When the amounts of projects grew, funding organizations such as the Dash Core Group, Inc. were created to act as contractors for the distribution of funds to many smaller decentralized projects. If this is good for decentralization is another question you should ask yourself though..

Privacy

The first thing I did was looking up the richlist of DASH. The richlist looks like the following image:

DASH richlist, does it look private to you?

A large part of privacy is the characteristics of the account balances: are account balances visible?

Changes in states of account balances can be used to decipher where transactions went. Also, displaying account balances is not private in of itself.

Privatesend is a feature enabled by the Masternode network of DASH which uses a coin-mixing mechanism called CoinJoin with some modifications to improve obfuscation of the sender of the transaction.

DASH’s CoinJoin requires activity on the chain, i.e., you need other users to mix with. It could therefore take a while before your DASH are fully mixed or “anonymized”. Depending on the amount in the transaction this can even take minutes to hours. Unlike the traditional CoinJoin mechanism , DASH doesn’t use centralized mixers but mixing achieved through its Masternode network. This does raise some questions regarding privacy as Masternodes can follow the sender and receiver of the transactions being mixed together. Furthermore, many Masternodes are run by Virtual Private Servers which can be compromised relatively easy by governments.

DASH allows both transparent and private transactions, this greatly hurts fungibility of DASH. In an ecosystem where both types of addresses exists, there is a probability for tainted funds and untainted funds to mix, which may get you into trouble if you use them.

Other technical characteristics of DASH:

2.5 minute block-time
Mining algorithm: X11-PoW
First Block on 2014–01–19
18.9 million max. supply and approx. 8.5M circulating
Max. blocksize: 2 MB
56 TPS max.
InstantSend: 2 sec. confirmation time
High early emission

InstantSend is a Masternode-enabled feature of DASH which enables confirmation times of under 2 seconds by locking in the transaction among a random set of 10 Masternodes.

One unfortunate bad aftertaste of DASH is the initial distribution which enabled miners to instamine around 2 million of DASH in 2 days. To put it in perspective: a masternode costs 1000 DASH or around 80K dollars now and there are only around 8.5M DASH in circulation.

PIRATE (ARRR) privacy tech

Pirate uses Zcash’s zero-knowledge proofs called zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge) which allow transaction data to be validated without revealing any information about the amount and the parties involved.

Sapling

What makes PIRATE unique is that it’s a forced shielded transactions blockchain, thus utilizing zk-SNARKS technology (z-transactions) which is arguably the best privacy tech there is.

PIRATE is mined into a transparent address, but can only go into a shielded address from there. The result of this feature is that atleast 99.99% of ARRR is shielded, dramatically increasing the privacy of the usage of the blockchain for sending funds.

Now that Pirate uses Sapling (conversion to Sapling is over 80%!), shielding of transactions is limited to the order of seconds.

Security

Furthermore, the PirateChain is protected by BTC hashrate through delayed-Proof-of-Work (dPoW). This mechanism ensures Piratechain is immune to reorganizations of the network because it is protect by BTC’s hashrate, KMD’s hashrate and it’s own hashrate. Protection is achieved by storing blockhashes (chainstate backups) of the PIRATE chain in the KMD blockchain, of which the latter has blockhashes stored into the Bitcoin blockchain.

Other non-privacy related features of PIRATE:

Blocktime: 60 seconds
Mining algorithm: Equihash PoW
dPoW security
Transaction fee: 0.0001 ARRR
Max. supply of 200 million ARRR
Transactions per second: 34 TPS max.
Tx size: 2kb-200 kb.
Sending to 100 addresses simultaneously in one transaction.
PIRATE supports TOR to obfuscate geographic location (IP)

Conclusion

DASH’s anonymity feature is not very strong compared to Pirate. The PrivateSend option is dependent on user activity which can’t guarantee your transaction is included in the next block and can take a while of you are unlucky. Furthermore, DASH allows sending to transparent addresses which greatly hurts fungibility. A quick look at the richlist can give you an estimation of wealth of its users, not very private.

Pirate has the stronger privacy tech and fungibility of the blockchain.

The DAO consisting of the Masternodes on the network is an interesting feature to say the least, it greatly improves vigor of the community. However a lot of the rewards go to the Dash Core Group as well making it a bit more centralized again.

Pirate has to thrive from donations from its community and percentages of pool fees.

The focus of DASH has been more geared towards ease of use and mainstream adoption. This is understandable as its privacy feature is not their strongest asset. For focussing on scalability it also doesn’t exhibit a high transactions per second limit which is 56 TPS, this is somewhat comparable to PIRATE.

As long as BTC’s hashrate is higher than DASH’s, Piratechain will be more secure than DASH as well thanks to delayed proof-of-work.

Thanks for reading and follow the links for more info about Pirate!

Cheers!

Flexatron

ATTENTION: Convert to Sapling before 10 February: https://dexstats.info/pirateswap.php

Links:

Website: pirate.black

Discord: https://discord.gg/mBZhZgz

Twitter: @PirateChain

Telegram https://t.me/piratechain

Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/piratechain

Bitcointalk Topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4979549.0