Hush Is Better Than Pirate

This document is an unordered list of various reasons why Hush is better than Pirate. It needs to be converted into a pretty website.

Pirate is a testcoin with a marketing department which is part of the larger "Komodo Ecosystem" which has been involved in many many shady ICO's, like the launching of KMD, and projects which are under investigation for fraud, like K64.

Talking To 3 Friends

Let's take a simple example that illustrates an important point. If you want to send a transaction to three friends, every Tuesday at 3:30pm, about your "secret meeting", and you use either ARRR or HUSH. Almost all transactions on ARRR have 2 outputs, the person receiving funds, and the "change output", which goes back to the original zaddr. If you send messages to your 3 (or 4 or any higher number) of friends, especially with any kind of pattern (once per day, or every week, or every 39.4 hours), that can all be seen from public blockchain data. Shielded addresses on ARRR do not protect you.

With HUSH, we "round up" to protect the privacy of people communicating with between 1 and 8 others. So you can send a message to 4 people or 7 or just 1, and it looks exactly the same on the HUSH network. Talking To 3 Friends is not a problem when using HUSH.

If you want to routinely talk to 9 others or more, that is when it starts to stand out with HUSH. In practice, you can just use another transaction, and send to 8 with one transaction and 1 with another.

Your ISPs Know Too Much

HUSH was the very first cryptocoin to enforce encrypted Peer-To-Peer (P2P) connections, which is just like the little lock in your browser tab, which means https is being used. Modern websites are encrypted because so many problems and attacks happen when they aren't.

When Satoshi wrote Bitcoin, http was still widely being used and Bitcoin spoke in plaintext. Unfortunately just about every cryptocoin has kept this design flaw. HUSH requires encrypted connections between peers, where ARRR does not. This means that when you make a transaction, even though your address is not known to your ISP, your transaction ID and IP address is known by them. This is not good.

With HUSH, every node connection must be encrypted with https, which means your ISP (and the ISP of your ISP, etc..) does not know when you make a transaction, nor your transaction ID. They always know your IP address, which is why not giving them your txid is so important.

For the nerds: we use TLS 1.3 ONLY (no older TLS versions are allowed) and downgrade attacks are not allowed, i.e. if your node can't speak TLS 1.3 with valid ciphersuite, it cannot connect to the network.

Hush will not Dump on you

ARRR has existed for 2 years and just over 90% of the total supply had been mined already which means that a few individuals (Pirate devs) own most of the coins. Hush was created in November 2016 and only about 50% has been mined as of May 2021, over 4 years after the original launch of HUSH. HUSH has the same "emission schedule" as Bitcoin itself: block reward halving every 4 years. A real-time counter showing the next HUSH halving can be found here.

Hush Does Not Support KYC

Hush does not help the identity theft industry by linking personal information to blockchain data, which does not work to reduce fraud and is almost always stolen, re-sold and used for illegimate purposes.

Hush was the first coin ever to measure anonsets in real-time

Anonsets, AKA "anonymity sets" are a measure of how much privacy a privacy coin has. Hush was the first cryptocoin ever to measure this in real-time, via the getchaintxstats RPC, which Duke Leto worked on in Bitcoin Core. In fact, Bitcoin Core has code from HUSH, since Duke Leto upstreamed a change from Hush's version of getchaintxstats to the version in BTC Core.

Pirate attempted to pay him to add this so-called zindex feature, but they treated him so poorly, he refused, and so they are unable to measure their anonset in real-time.

Pirate is old unmaintained Duke code

Duke Leto wrote large portions of PirateCoin while a Komodo Core developer for about two years, and now it's unmaintained because there is nobody left that understands it. Additionally, KMD developers consider PirateCoin a seperate project, and routinely make decisions that hurt the privacy of PirateCoin users.

Pirate lacks Sietch

Pirate does not have the advanced privacy technology called "Sietch", which makes it much easier for blockchain analysis companies to attack.

Pirate disabled Duke's privacy features to KMD

Duke Leto wrote code to protect against a specific kind of attack (called a linkability attack) and since Pirate and KMD developers [who actually maintain Pirate as they have no dedicated developers of their own] don't understand it, they commented it out. Lulz.

Pirate has no developers

The original developers of Pirate were jl777 and Duke Leto, who gave jl777 the idea for Pirate, by asking "What could the opposite of -ac_public=1 mean" ? The next day, the Pirate testcoin was born.

Pirate requires a 1.6GB download of junk files

To run a full Pirate node, you must download gigabytes of junk that is required for a disabled part of the code, wasting the bandwidth of every single new user.

Pirate is based on Sprout

Sprout is a very old version of z-addresses (zaddrs) that have been successfully attacked and are additionally extremely slow. Pirate based their chain on this old tech, which is why it's so damn slow to sync a Pirate full node. Additionally, if any Pirate developers existed, they would need to maintain the old Sprout codebase in addition to modern Sapling zaddrs. HUSH was the very first cryptocoin to be based solely on Sapling zaddrs.

Pirate full node takes days to sync

Their full node is so slow to sync that they have built-in the concept of downloading bootstraps (trusting somebody else's blockchain history!) into the full node itself. They truly don't grasp basic blockchain security principles.

Contributing

Do you have an idea or meme gif that JUST MUST APPEAR HERE? Join Telegram and ask for a Gitea account, then fork this repo and submit a Pull Request. Patches Welcome!

If you hate Telegram, you can contact Duke Leto on Keybase about contributing.

Hush no longer uses Github, as Duke Leto's account was suspended for unknown reasons 🤓 .

Haterz

Thank you so much for your attention! Please hate us more, we are making a scrapbook.

Thank You

Thank you to Satoshi for building on the shoulders of people before them, not being afraid to "roll your own crypto", and creating something beautiful. It was not the beginning nor end of the story. Bitcoin maximalists are deranged lunatics and privacy coin developers will prove you wrong, mark our words.

License

GPLv3

Authors

The Hush Developers