Whether you were selling crack on Silk Road, or you simply understand the importance of maintaining personal privacy as an inherent human right, you are probably looking at some privacy shitcoins.

We love looking into these coins. One day we’ll do a comparison on a bunch of privacy coins, but today we’re looking at one shitty little coin that has caught our attention over the past year: PIVX (Private Instant Verified Transaction...but no one calls it this).

Let’s dig in and learn some shit.

PIVX (ticker: PIVX)

Mid-Tier Shitcoin

Wtf is PIVX?

PIVX aims to be the standard for sending transactions globally in a fast, cheap and secure fashion. It is a privacy focused proof-of-stake currency that is a fork of Dash, but also incorporates the Zerocoin protocol, so that transactions can be truly anonymous. They have also implemented a protocol called SwiftX which helps to make transactions nearly instant.  

Pretty cool shit.

When sending PIVX, you can turn them in to what is called ‘zPIV’, which sends them extremely anonymously using the Zerocoin protocol. Check out our BTCP (Bitcoin Private) shitcoin review to learn more about the Zerocoin protocol and zero-knowledge proofs.

Recently they implemented zPIV staking so now even your staking rewards are anonymous. This is important if you are gaining a bunch of income from your PoS nodes (but we do not condone tax evasion ;) ). Taking things a step further, they have masternode functionality implemented with their system. If you have 10,000 PIVX, then you can set up a masternode to stake more shit than your average pleb PoS node.

Wtf is a masternode?

If you are n00b enough where you have not heard of a masternode, we’ll briefly explain. Much like a normal wallet staking coins, a masternode basically runs the same wallet software, but provides additional services to the network, which results in more income for the masternode holder.

Masternodes help validate transactions and contribute more computing power to the network. It’s a beefier set up.

Specific to PIVX, masternodes also help maintain their decentralized budgeting system, track proposals and voting on the network, assist with instant transactions, and provide more support to make transactions more anonymous.

We can dive deep into how each of these work, but for all of you HODLers, understanding and trusting this should be sufficient. If you really want to know more, tweet at us or some shit.

So...basically, a masternode is more expensive to obtain (10,000 PIVX in this case) and provides more services to the network compared to average stakers who can gain rewards from holding any number of PIVX in their wallet.

Who tf is behind this shit?

They have some ‘well known’ devs in the space, but they go by psuedonyms. A couple notable characters boasted by the PIVX team are ‘Presstab’ and s3v3n h4cks. We do not like when teams are anonymous like this, no matter how skilled they are. Presstab is the founder of Hyperstake and a self-claimed ‘Proof of Stake’ expert. He’s also worked on MultiSend.

In the end, the efforts of the PIVX team shows through their success of hitting roadmap items on time, and also having great customer support if issues arise (we have ran into some issues with their wallet, but they really do care to help you...willing to Webex and such). Still, it would be nice if the team would be more transparent about their background and expertise, but we’ll let their efforts speak for themselves for now.

Additionally, they have an excellent marketing team, lead by Bryan ‘Snappy’ Doreian. This guy has quite the personality and really grabs your attention when he is on screen. He’s full of energy. We also see the PIVX brand shitting out content and advertising regularly; it’s impressive to watch. Every holiday, event, anniversary or milestone hit has it’s own custom graphics and marketing behind it. It's one of the most impressive marketing/branding efforts in the crypto space.

Overall, we rate this is as mid-tier shitcoin with hopes they can rise to a higher-tier shitcoin. They have big competition, but they are one of the best underdog competitors we have been following in the scene.

Anyways, hope this helped, make up your damn mind, shitcoins are cheap now.

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron