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H-ARRR-dcore
So here we are in 2021 and crypto is in full season. Bitcoin's (BTC) price grew in the greatest bull-market yet, only to cause a fall like dominos. Businesses started accepting crypto as payments. Normies started getting into it and buying. The media went from portraying it as a scam to something we must embrace, ironically enough all right before the big crash. Wealth redistribution, anyone?
The merits of it as a store of value aside, crypto has some inherit flaws: large mining fees, coutless scam coins, a lack of privacy and anonymity like cash, long transaction times, high volatility, and too many wallets. However, multi-coin wallets offset the last point, at least. Heroes to the right, like Trump, say it should be highly regulated to where the dollar stays in charge. Heroes to the left, like Biden, follow suit.
But what if there was a way to have a cryptocurrency that implements one of the tenets of cryptography: obfuscation? Monero (XMR) and Wownero (WOW) address this. Pirate Chain (ARRR) does as well. Merging the ideas of BTC, XMR, WOW, Zcash, and Komodo, ARRR acts much like GNU/Linux. In other words, a mix of many different ideas into a cohesive whole. Outside of pirate memes, ARRR has the ability of anonymized transactions where only the sender and reciever know about the private transaction details. Ghostship OS seeks to continue this idea moving forward.
Ghostship uses nothing more than a very stripped-down version of Linux and XFCE to do a few things, the core being a hardware wallet-like distro. You don't have a web browser. You "don't" have a package manager. You have little more than 3 icons on the desktop and a minimalist taskbar.
On the desktop you have a "Power Off" link, the Pirate Lite Wallet QT application, and a brief how-to PDF on the merits of ARRR and how Ghostship can do MAC spoofing, VPNs, with how to set up the like. On the taskbar, battery status indicator, wifi/network options, calendar, and system notifications. Okie dokie. What about anything else? No terminal. No file browser. No text editor. ARRRgh. From a general OS perspective it's worthless. From a digital/hardware crypto wallet perspective it's neat. From my perspective it's a nightmare. Just use Tails. I do a custom Arch distro that's portable and encrypted and am considering an OpenBSD setup that continues that spirit of gimmickiness. Right now, just use Tails. Sonic does, why can't you as well?
The OS is primarily centered around the Pirate Lite Wallet. An outdated version from 2019, copyright 2020. Ah, but it can check and install updates from the GitHub! Yeah, the same PirateOS repo that's.... from 2019... Yeah. Outside of the UI differences and some other changes it functions the same as the current version as of this article in June 2021. Just some layout differences and new themes is all. However, security-minded folk are wheezing at the thought of a custom GNU/Linux distro from over 2 years ago running equally outdated apps. I feel tightness and sharp pains in my chest. As time goes on this is going to become even more of a security concern so just use Tails. Something new. Please. Have a series of paper wallets that you can pass around like dollar bills.
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The wallet functions like in the video and that's the core focus of this OS/distro. A merge between software and hardware wallets with a bit of a bite and a game plan that has been on the bench since 2019. Not a good idea, I don't recommend it. I have Pirate Lite (up-to-date) installed on an encrypted volume/partition on a flash drive. You need the correct keyfiles to unlock it and you need the correct password to access the wallet once in the encrypted volume. The benefit is that it's more cross-platform, like a hardware wallet, and is difficult for anyone but me to know how it works and how to use it. The seed phrase is backed up and securely stored in a watertight treasure chest that I may or may not have buried in my backyard, with or without a map to it on my wall as art in my bedroom (SPOILER: there is no map).
Now for the fun stuff: what's under the hood! The bootloader gives ya two options: Ghostship and Ghostship Failsafe. Select the Failsafe option to see what's going on under the hood.
It boots aaaaaannnd.... BAM!!! This be all we need right here. Running openSUSE Leap 15.2 Alpha on top of the Linux Kernel v5.3.15-1p152.1-default. You can login as root with no password. Yeeaaah... startx gives issues but that's no problem as we love terminal and tty mode. Let's see if we can package management via openSUSE's zypper! I like tmux, so let's see...
It works! So basically, it's SUSE with a locked down XFCE UI for the default linux user. Creative. The rest works like you would expect a SUSE distro to run under the hood. Oh, and it has vim. Wise choice.
While the thoughts of a PirateOS fleet and Ghostship were neat (haha rhyme), the merits were not there and were really begging the question. While the idea of a crpyto-focused distro sounds hawt, it's just another gimmick like HannahMontanaOS or that satanic Linux thing. At the end of the day, a minimalist system with the option of installing such packages is best. That's why Windows is still in the business world despite needing to desperately die off. Thank you, I'll be here all night.
Thanks for reading, and HattyHacking;
ARRR: zs1ts2llw2rt35d6p2ut63hfw22y9qsun5zdylkgwm6pj5h3rucfnyq0h0qmf8swjc2vfam52c7e90
