Many options, many junk, and a lot of excessive marketing, but which coin does offer the best privacy, and of course overall the most security. Well there are not enough good options. Most of them are just vaporware, while others have serious flaws.
Let's review them all shortly, these are my opinions based on my research:
Monero
It certainly looks like Monero is the king, but it just had a fatal bug 1 week ago:
The entire Cryptonote technology that Monero uses for privacy enhancement was compromized. Totally. Which means that the developers are really caught with their pants down. If they can't detect such grevious bug in time, then maybe their coins are shit. Although they have fixed this in Monero, but the bug is still inside Bytecoin, DashCoin, DigitalNote. So by extension all of these coins are crap. If it happened once, it can happen again. Zero day bugs are a very very big threat.
So I don't know, maybe Monero really needs 2-3 more years of real security review and audits before we can consider it a safe currency. But for now it's crap. I mean this just happened 1 week ago FFS. WTF?
Dash
Dash also has a privacy feature named PrivateSend, however I believe the way it works is that it relies on Master Nodes to mix transaction. So if some Masternodes (or their ISP) is recording their transactions, then all transactions are public. So it's a sham. Now we know for sure that ISP's record internet traffic, thanks to Snowden, so it literally provides 0 Privacy. It's just a big sham.
Well yes it's good to hide transactions from your wife, but it certainly doesn't help journalists or activists in an oppressed country to hide from their tyrannical government. In fact it's quite immoral and dangerous to advertise something as anonymous which is not, since activist lives can be in danger.
Shadowcash et al
Allegedly it's a scam, many people have said that it's a scam:
- Main thread closed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=745352.12300
- Main dev jumped the ship to another project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1473811.0
- More: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1609461.0
- More: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1863861.0
Zcash
Z-cash is very questionable, I think it has a black box setup which means that you had to rely on the devs to set up the system in order to be anonymous and I think the number of new coins issues is unknown. Which means that there could easily be a backdoor in it, or a bug like in Monero and we will have no idea about it.
There there were many people who were skeptical about it, INCLUDING ME:
- https://steemit.com/money/@profitgenerator/z-cash-is-probably-a-scam
- https://medium.com/@yobanjo/zcash-founders-might-make-60-million-in-first-year-2c9658b2dc5d
- https://medium.com/@yobanjo/watch-out-zcash-is-another-scam-5dc8add99f65
- https://decentralize.today/five-reasons-zcash-is-the-most-corporate-cryptocoin-youve-ever-seen-a77ac430b0e8
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1342065.0
- https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@hms818/zcash-has-gained-80-after-partnership-with-jp-morgan
Conclusion
So it really looks like most of them are scams, shitty marketing attempts or just plain and simply don't work. I mean it's too good to be true to begin with. Having 100% privacy is really hard to achieve in this day and age of surveillance.
It's not impossible, but we will need a lot more technology for it. My best bet is on Monero though, even if they had this shitty bug recently, it is still probably the single best candidate for now. Maybe there is one better out there, but for now this is the best one in my opinion.
Sources:
https://pixabay.com
https://www.dash.org/promotional-graphics/, license CC BY-SA 4.0
nice article but i can tell your a skeptic....the cryptonote bug was only less than a point of a percent of "fake" coins...
Bytecoin is still good! all monero type cryptonote is good! check minergate u can just mine bytecoin, monero, ethereum, ethereum classic, so easy to mine! itsa real @profitgenerator lol https://minergate.com/a/d582a3e158500d130a38afed ive had nothing but good come from installing and using minergate on all my devices android and laptops
its a way to get free bytecoin or monero, but for bytecoin u can actually get manu undreds of Bytecoins even on old laptops over a fewdays or weeks! each will be $1 soon! i have like 100 BCN in a few days! .01 monero in a few weeks, its pretty nivce all free just using existing cpu and gpu...i mean we arent mining btc but we can still mine altcoins!
pretty nice GUI right?? one touch miining! only 1 percent pool maintance fee! u get nice referal cut of that 1 percent lol not much but funto stack up, will be valuble, these bytecoins will be!
How much money do you make from that mining /day?
from the 3 TH of lifetime pool.bitcooin.com contracts i paid $450 for i get like .001 BTC a day or about $2 a day ....and with minergate im getting like $4 a month now with bytecoin going up, i only have an old laptop and an adroid tablet and some other android phones mining for me, not much, but still im getting like 10 Bytecoins a day and they will be worth $1 and more soon!
so start harding your bytecoins using minergate
You mean Bytecoin, the one with the 80% premine?
Be careful
Minergate has been known to steal hashrate. Also harming Monero decentralization.
Well I'm not saying they are totally worthless, but the risk is huge if this bug is still there.
My strategy would be to look for a reserve currency where I can store my wealth in. Looks like my strategy is flawed, I should just diversify until such currency arises.
Bitcoin would have been the one (I had 80% of my money in it), but I don't trust Bitcoin now:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@profitgenerator/uasf-bitcoin-is-finished
I bet on PIVX. A Dash fork with some improvements.
Only somewhat better, I like it too tho, but still Monero is better, tho less user friendly. Another that should be great is Verge. ...Anyways, have you people heard of ScpectreCoin? It's supposedly the ultimate privacy coin, some clone of ShadowCash but improved. I've heard both good and bad stuff about it, so I really don't know. Do you ?
Very good summary :-) Guess not many know about that. Thanks for sharing,
What do you think about stratis?
Thanks, I'm still researching, these are my observations for now.
Ok. Thank you very much.
and resteemed :-)
I don't like Stratis.
Interesting. Thanks for your opinion. I am not invested in startis but know many who are.
Price is parabolical + too overpriced + not much to offer. Maybe it'll go up, but I don't like it.
I don't invest in overpriced air, I like coins that have a purpose and are cheap.
Me too, I like cheap coins with a good concept and I missed on that the 6000- 9000 satoshi entry ;-)
I would never move coins from a small market to a big market unless it's a security issue. In altcoins we can pretty much see that there is a lot more % ROI in small market cap coins than in large ones. Exceptions are of course ETH and RIPPLE and BTC, but most of the time it's true.
hmm I wouldnt say that all is shit, it need developement time for such big projects
I think the current privacy winner is the Komodo platform. It is the most well tested and robust privacy that I'm aware of.
It's the same tech what ZCASH uses: zk-SNARKs
How is this any different than ZCASH detailed above. It seems to me that most of these are just copycats.
I don't know anything about ZCASH. I have been following Nxt and the SuperNet for a long time. The SuperNet split from Nxt and started using BitcoinDark and then became Komodo. The main BitcoinDark dev is with the Komodo platform now.
Is ZCASH using BitcoinDark tech?
ZCASH uses Zsnark technology, I dont know how that originated.
PVIX seems like a good privacy coin, they announced the Zerocoin Protocol few days ago.
They did? :o
zcash and monero OK, Dash is a joke with the premining + the masternodes!!!
Pre-mine is fake news, it was a fair launch with an error in the code that kept the difficulty artificially low. Plenty of other people were mining at launch and got easy Dash as well. Any of them who held until recently are now millionaires, not just Evan.
the issue is not just money. It is that it means more on Dash. I generally don't care about instamine. Developpers do what they want.
I think the Masternode setup of Dash is still better than what bitcoin has with 85% monopoly of the Bitcoin Core software to push through patches.
I like the democracy aspect of Dash though. Even if their privacy is worthless at least it tries to be decentralized unlike BTC.
Yeah Dash actually has a good governance model. Ultimately I would like a cryptocurrency close to the idea that its value comes from people using it, not the developers dictating everything.
The bad side with privacy in Dash is that Masternodes are so important that you cannot feel safe with the pre-mine. Also it does mean that an agency which targetted Dash when it was very cheap can de-anonymize a bunch of people.
Well then I would just not use DASH for anonymity, but for general use I think it's decent.
it's too bad... Their next version, evolution, is looking promising. Bitcoin core could learn a thing or two.
I don't like it, not suitable for big storage in my opinion, but it has nice features for casual use.
so what is your pick?
I want to resteem the article, but I cant. Any ideas why?
Thanks for the great article...
Im a newb and im trying to get involved in cryptocurrencies... There is a lot to absorb. One of the biggest challenges im facing is that i dont understand the language yet. The other is knowing which cryptos are worth investing in...
I was about to jump into Dash but after reading this i think ill do more research before investing...
Thanks and followed...
You don't need to know the language of the cryptos, just pick a safe wallet and use it that way. Besides there is nothing wrong with that, aside from this problem. Otherwise it's working greatly. In fact it's currently the 2nd best currency after BTC in my opinion, and if BTC goes south like how I predicted, then maybe DASH can take it's place.
Great post. Agree with most statemens:-). Resteeming.
Shadowcash is (was) not scam. It was just recently closed in favor a new project called Particl based on it.
Well those moves are certainly questionable. I remember one guy on Bitcointalk having a ton of negative feedback, like scam accusations, who was reportedly affiliated with the Shadowcash team. I think they also moved to another coin, but not PARTICL.
I don't like altcoins that have that many shenanigans and issues with dev team. Without a stable dev team, the coin is pointless.
Thank you for sharing this information about crypto privacy. As an investor, it's important to know this. I saved this post for a future reference.