Xspec is very inexpensive compared to Monero, and both are neck and neck in terms of privacy and anonymity capability.
That is totally not true. What on earth are you talking about. Who have same level of anonymity as Monero? Do I need to paste what i wrote up once again? What in Monero do what. OK just for you:
Simple, anonymity in Monero the most fungible and untraceable crypto coin in existence is achieved with with 4 things:
1. Ring signatures, that hide the output being used by hiding it among several others that also appear to be used. NOTE: this is very different than mixing.
2. Stealth addresses, that removes the association between outputs and addresses.
3. RingCT, that is basically a confidential transactions that works with a ring signatures. (Updated with Bulletproofs in 2018)
4. Kovri, that hides the IP for the transaction broadcast. This data is never stored on-chain, but it can help protect users from malicious nodes. ( Updated in 2018)
But even with all that Monero is still work in progress and research and adds new innovations to always stray ahead of blockchain analysis.
To add some to how much development there is in Monero and how many people work on Monero check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K33PoKM7vOM
Now explain me how is each thing solved in the other coin so is par to Monero.
Both I2P and Tor are commonly used to hide the IP addresses of users. But in Monero we can see IP-addresses of users - run the script: https://github.com/DotNetRussell/MoneroUserScraper to obtain the IP addresses "213.114.82.127", "82.161.134.181", "73.150.225.122", ... of the Monero wallets and nodes: https://dotnetrussell.com/index.php/2017/10/21/locating-monero-users-via-transaction-broadcasts/
Comparison of current, already implemented technologies (excluding technologies from the roadmap)
- Monero (XMR): Ring signatures, Stealth addresses, RingCT
- Spectrecoin (XSPEC): Ring signatures, Stealth addresses, Tor+OBFS4
More information about the current state of the technology in different coins: https://hsto.org/webt/ff/fd/c5/fffdc5rsimcwozv65u9v21wwhyo.png
Even if spectrecoin and monero's ring signature implementation were the same (Are they? I have yet to see serious analysis of spectrecoin from critic or shill), monero's anonymity set is larger (How many private tx does spectrecoin have a month?) and it's fungible due to mandatory privacy. So until spectrecoin is doing 100k tx and all its tx are private, you are comparing apples and oranges.