Also, coins that employ view keys will be as private and as voluntarily reviewable as cash.
But this is all off-topic--I don't really care if dash is dying or not--i just can't listen to the flawed logic of its privacy argument.
Speaking of "flawed logic", look no further than your own avatar. You're one word short of perfection - change "fights" to "is" and you'll have a semblance of reality because you make 2 fatal flaws your propagandistic “reasoning”:
[1] - that the detection of a sending address in a given blockchain transaction amounts to generalised "de-anonynimsation"
[2] - that hosting centralisation equates to functional centralisation
In [1], this is only true in the case of a fiat banking system. It isn't true in the case of crypto, where regardless of what's visible in the blockchain you can only "de-anonymise" an address from social or other means of communication
outwith the blockchain (for example you inform me of an address that you control).
Even then, I can’t glean much more information about your financial movements as long as the blockchain remains sufficiently fungible (i.e. undergoes perpetual pre-emptive mixing as happens on the Dash network). The reason for that is that crypto (at least Satoshi's privacy model) broke the association between bank accounts and individuals.
Lets take a step into history for a minute. The 'cryptographically hidden' transaction mechanism that technologies like cryptonote are trying to push was originally designed for FIAT, not crypto. It is both needed and can be accommodated in the fiat system for 2 reasons:
[1] -
needed because in fiat, an ‘account’ is synonymous with a legal entity (or person)
[2] - can be
accommodated because fiat has a trusted third party (a bank) in the loop to endorse the veracity of the monetary medium and therefore does not rely on public consensus
See this NSA document from 1996 which by now has been fairly well circulated amongst the crypto community.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm#2It describes to a ’T’ the privacy principles behind Cryptonote hidden blockchain. In particular, this paragraph:
There is one noteable exception, however - Figure 1. There is a bank in the equation, hence the need for the cryptographic plumbing because in those days we WERE talking about shuffling identities around the blockchain.
Satoshi modelBitcoin did away this model and introduced 2 fundamental revisions:
[1] - eliminated the “Bank” as the ultimate arbiter of monetary veracity and replaced it with a public consensus model where all aspects of the system were directly accountable to the end users
[2] - anonymised it so there was no longer any association between a person and an address
That fact right there ended the need for cryptographic obfuscation of the transactional mechanics. In fact, it now made it positively toxic in the context of the new mined cryptocurrency world where the trusted third party had been eliminated.
The implications of this are that the two conditions that applied to Fiat cited earlier are now reversed, i.e.:
[1] - it is
not needed due to the fact that an address is no longer synonymous with a legal entity (or person)
[2] - it
cannot be accommodated (is toxic) due to the absence of a trusted third party
No matter how hard proponents of 'invisible blockchains' try to get us to go back to fiat and bang our eardrums with the broken record that "addresses are people", the reality is that they are not. Far from being the “leading edge” the cryptographically protected private blockchain is a relic of the 90’s and has no place in modern cryptocurrencies.
As for financial censorship, the invisible blockchain isn’t protection from the NSA, it’s OWNED by the NSA.