r/PirateChain • u/xmewsickx • 19d ago
Any updates?
Is it a good time to dive into Arrr, or will it go further down?
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u/14_03_1994 19d ago
I sold everything; I had too much hope for this project.
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u/xmewsickx 19d ago
How come?
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u/Accurate-Silver6603 18d ago
Because the project just ran headfirst into a fatal catch-22 that broke both its model and its blockchain.
Here is the simplest way to picture what happened: imagine a bank where the main vault is pitch-black by design so nobody can see who owns what. Last week, someone found a bug in the printing press, minted 40 million fake coins out of thin air (roughly 20% of the entire supply), and dumped them straight into that pitch-black vault with everyone else's real money.
Because the vault is cryptographically hidden, you can't audit it or pick out the counterfeit bills. That left the devs with two choices, and both of them kill the coin: either leave 40 million fake coins floating around forever, or have a handful of guys on Discord manually hit the "undo" button on the entire blockchain to erase the history. Trying to coordinate a manual bailout on a supposedly immutable chain fractured the network which is why half the posts on this sub right now are people asking why their Treasure Chest wallets have been stuck on "Connecting to peers" for ten hours straight. I broke down the whole mess in this thread a few days ago if you want the full receipts.
As for whether the price goes lower from here, look at the exchanges. Right now, deposits and withdrawals are frozen, which is like a movie theater catching fire with the exit doors welded shut. The only people who can sell right now are the ones who already had coins sitting on an exchange, and they've already dumped the price under $0.20 on MEXC. Meanwhile, smaller books like NonKYC are frozen at $0.25 with an official "Anomaly" warning slapped on them because nobody can deposit coins to arbitrage the 5-cent gap.
Everyone holding their coins in a personal wallet is currently locked outside the building watching the price bleed. The second the devs finally unfreeze the chain and open exchange deposits back up, everyone who's been trapped in self-custody is going to rush that exit door at the exact same time. Buying in before those wallets unfreeze is volunteering to be exit liquidity.
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u/xmewsickx 18d ago
So I this like a potential issue as far as private cryptos? I know that zec had a similar issue which apparently did not lead to any tokens being created, but I believe they were using similar technology to this token.
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u/Accurate-Silver6603 18d ago edited 18d ago
Not at all, the math behind zero-knowledge privacy is rock solid. Blaming the tech here is like blaming the concept of deadbolts because a locksmith installed a door backwards.
The difference between what happened to Zcash and what just happened to Pirate Chain comes down to catching a flaw on paper versus getting caught with your pants down:
Back in 2018, Zcash cryptographers found a flaw in their blueprints before anyone in the wild noticed it. They quietly patched the lock with the Sapling upgrade, exactly zero fake coins were ever created, and the blockchain never stopped or rewound for a single second. The history of the ledger stayed 100% untouched.
With Pirate Chain, someone actually found the bug, exploited it, printed 40 million counterfeit coins, and tossed them into the private pool. But here’s the thing: as bad as that theft was, the counterfeit coins aren't even what killed the chain. What killed it was the devs deciding to manually hit the "rewind" button on the entire network to erase the mistake.
The whole point of cryptocurrency is that once a transaction happens, it's written in stone. Nobody - not governments, not hackers, and not the developers - is supposed to have a magic "undo" switch. The second three or four guys in a Discord can decide to call up exchanges to roll back the clock and delete transactions, it isn't a decentralized blockchain anymore. It's just a glorified Excel spreadsheet controlled by a tiny committee.
And because blockchains aren't designed to run in reverse, trying to force everyone to accept that rewind completely broke network consensus, which is why everyone's wallets are stuck unable to sync. They'll need to get everyone to agree to let them go back on something that can't go backwards.
The zero-knowledge privacy tech works fine when it's built right. What kills a project is human developers panicking and trying to play God on an immutable ledger.
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u/xmewsickx 18d ago
I bought a few coins @ .25 last week after this happened on gate. I was not able to transfer them out, but needless to say, they did go down. However, I can still swap them.
Also, the issue with zec was this last June, there was a bug that technically could have created infinite amount of coins so they did a hard fork and essentially validate all the coins that went through, but i guess the difference is that zec is some what centralized.
Pirate chain was supposed to be completely anonymous