Ask anyone on the street what comes to mind when they hear someone arguing in favor of “privacy” and it will likely be the misconception of its use for criminal activity. This article presents to you many reasons for privacy in today’s world and the very near future’s interconnected world of personal finance.

First, we have to set this premise: understand that blockchain is here to stay and is already being integrated into large scale financial institutions that you use on a daily basis (eg., JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity, and others).

On to how this will affect you. Ask yourself these questions:

• Would you want your health insurance company to know that you spent money on cigarettes, as seen on a public blockchain?
• Would you want your employer to know that you take one-hour breaks at Starbucks every day at 10am and 3pm?
• Would you want your vehicle insurance company to know that you privately settled a small fender bender and chose not to file a claim?
• Would you want your loan company to raise your interest rates because they found out you lost 70% of your financial portfolio?
• Would you want the balance of your financial assets to be laid out on the public blockchain?
• Would you want your wallet on a public blockchain showing that you or your significant other spent a large amount at a fertility clinic or abortion clinic?

The common person will not know how to (or have the resources to) track transactions from one wallet to another and trace it back to an IP address that identifies your house. However, this tracing takes a matter of minutes at the institutional level and is spurring the niche industry of Blockchain Forensics. Already companies such as Cipher Trace are offering solutions to reverse analyze blockchain transactions. The Danish and Japanese governments have employed such solutions to solve crimes. The US Federal government, through such agencies as IRS, Homeland Security, and ICE, has engaged several such companies to create custom blockchain data-harvesting software to reverse look-up transactions with the goal of tracing it back to individuals.

During a TED Talk, investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald said, “I’ve debated this issue around the world, and every single time somebody has said to me, ‘I don’t really worry about invasions of privacy because I don’t have anything to hide,’ I always tell them the same thing: I get out a pen and write down my email address. Then I say, ‘Here’s my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you’re doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you’re not a bad person, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.’” – Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist and author of No Place to Hide.

If you are a crypto investor who entered via Coinbase or Gemini and linked your bank account, all of your wallets are non-shielded and are all linked back to you. Your personal characteristics of how you trade, your preferences of project types, whether you are an easy prey for scam projects, are all out there for the reaping.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Inc., has said, “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. No matter what country you live in, that right should be protected, in keeping with four essential principles:

• First, companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place.
• Second, users should always know what data is being collected from them and what it’s being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.
• Third, companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it.
• And fourth, everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights.”

Bitcoin is the best option the world has for a currency with sound monetary policy. The virtues of Bitcoin are many, but the public ledger of Bitcoin makes it at best pseudonymous. The transparency of Bitcoin, however, is detrimental and even dangerous at many levels. Every transaction reveals the balance of your wallet to the other party. It does not take any stretch of the imagination for large corporations to track you through your wallet transactions. In fact, this is so much easier than trying to track you through your credit card transactions, as those are sequestered in private servers. By contrast, with Bitcoin, the blockchain is broadcast globally. Even worse, nefarious actors can target you once they have identified your generous wallet balance. This public display to the world of your financial status is found not just in Bitcoin but in also in every cryptocurrency without native privacy. Financial privacy is paramount to individuals and business entities.

“Privacy is not about the right to be left alone but the right to exercise control. In our increasingly data-driven economy, privacy is money.” – Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation.

Truly private, digital cash is a fundamental pillar of any economy. There are numerous variants of Bitcoin that claim to be private, but almost all have optional privacy. Optional privacy is NO privacy at all.

Your Financial Privacy Today Is Your Freedom Tomorrow

In light of the numerous data breaches and Facebook’s mishandling of personal information, many of us would agree that our current generation has lost the war for personal data privacy. With the explosion of cryptocurrencies and the advent of central bank digital currencies, we are facing an uphill battle for our financial privacy. Bitcoin evangelist Marty Bent said, “money is dictated as free speech.” The freedom to do as you wish with your money is fundamental to free speech. Returning to the original intent of a currency for the people of the world, privacy-focused cryptocurrencies are the best option.

Enter Pirate Chain, a digital currency designed with the mission to protect financial privacy. We would like to invite you to join us in our movement.

Pirate Chain is the first cryptocurrency to implement a private-by-default use of the strongest and most highly acclaimed privacy protocol in the industry, ZK-SNARK (Zero Knowledge-Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge). All $ARRR addresses are invisible to the public, as are all transactions. This information is only available to the transacting parties who retain the power to opt out of privacy by revealing the transaction ID as proof of transaction. Hence, Pirate Chain turns the privacy industry on its head, and returns the power of privacy to users by empowering them with the option to opt-out.

Every transaction is encrypted in Pirate Chain’s infinitely growing anonymity set, notably, the largest of its kind in the industry. The anonymity set can be followed live here, https://anonset.dexstats.info/. $ARRR is secured by dPoW (delayed proof of work), which indexes the Pirate blockchain onto Litecoin and Komodo’s blockchain, rendering it nearly impossible to be attacked. $ARRR was fairly launched in 2018 with no premine and no block tax.

The pillars of this currency are rooted to the best fundamentals of a pirate life: a fervent desire for freedom, and the right to live a life free from oppression by a broken system..

Now is the time.We ask that you to stand for privacy, and stand with Pirate Chain.

Good things come to those who wait; follow the treasure chest near Galt’s Gulch at booth #906. We will be giving away T-shirts and other Pirate Chain treasures at our booth. Also, stop by for a ticket to our special luncheon happening on Saturday, July 24^th from 1pm-2pm. Fleet Commander Lootz from Pirate Chain will share his personal story, “How I became a Pirate.” Seats are limited, so they ARRR being released on a first come first serve basis.

To learn more about how Pirate Chain protects your financial privacy today, and to liberate the financial freedom of the world tomorrow, visit us at https://pirate.black/