Topic: Which currency should I use to stay anonymous? - page 2. (Read 3438 times)

All the issues I have mentioned aside (which are enough to sink the ship), the name itself is "shadow-". 
 
I do not see a path to mass-adoption with a name that brings to mind dark markets and illegitimate business.  To have large value, you must have many participants bring and store value in a network.  There is already a theoretical maximum number who will adopt a currency named 'shadow'.  The Cryptonote coins do not suffer from this branding error, and are primed to be worldwide financial networks.  This is where large-scale security and value both lie. 
 
All are linked together in a self-feedback loop: size of the mining network, adoption, usage, value, brand recognition, economy.  The majority (and especially large financial institutions where large amounts of human value are currently 'locked up') will not pour this value in to a crucible that feels designed to do something illicit. 
 
Even the Dash-kids figured this out. 
 
Stop your Sith madness and join the Jedi of the cryptocurrency world.

 
 
Shadowcash is a non-starter.  They had some wonky temporary PoW-transition-to-PoS silliness.  Basically they committed cardinal sin #1 of cryptoland which was having a launch that put a large number of coins into the hands of a select group of people in a non-fair manner then changed the rules of the game for 'everyone else'. 
 
No.  Just no. 
 
Give me a pure PoW shitcoin anyday over such juvenile games.  And with the vastly superior Cryptonote coins on the market you don't have to even choose. 
 
I recognize that Shadowcash is run by actual people, some of which actually have bigger dreams besides 'zomg rich'.  I have encouraged this camp to abandon the Shadowcash concept and come join us in Cryptonote land where the future lies.  There is real talent there, and those people are welcome to bring their abilities over to Monero and Aeon while it is still ultra-dirt-cheap to get in. 

brand new coins with no tx history just like mining them

Shadowcash doesn't suffer from that Zerocash flaw, but it has been built in such a way that if Zerocash ever comes to fruition then it will be able to slot strait into the Shadowcash framework. 

It currently has all the advantages of Cryptonote coins with the added advantages of being able to freshly mint your own coins by converting SDT into SDC (brand new coins with no tx history just like mining them) and it is built on the bitcoin code base which enables compatibility with bitcoin going forward as well as faster development. 

And hide all your metadata perfectly (which is virtually impossible).

And trust the owner of that mixing site you are using (which is stupid as shit, especially given the NSA can serve him with a gag order or hack his servers).

Zerocash is deeply flawed on a fundamental level.  It requires "Genesis Keys" to be created at the origin block.  If someone held all these keys, they could basically utterly destroy/manipulate the currency.  There can be one key (really bad and unlikely) or even a hundred keys (more likely) - but the fact remains that if one entity ever held all these keys, the could destroy the currency.  That is an unacceptable risk. 
 
Also, it is too opaque.  If someone discovered a coin generation bug, no one would know until the market was endlessly flooded with counterfeit coins - the blockchain is too 'dark'. 
 
Cryptonote coins really are the best solution: Monero, Aeon, and possibly Boolberry if they can work the kinks out. 

Just a (arguably plagiarized) copy of Cryptonote technology, so same conclusions as for Monero.

https://z.cash/ is the only potential solution for making metadata correlation irrelevant, but all I know about it is here:

http://zerocash-project.org/

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I did point out in 2013 exactly how Bitcoin would end up failing, which I said would be game theory of centralization around mining. And I was correct.

I never wrote that Bitcoin would have no utility and in fact I wrote that the utility of Bitcoin was very inspiring. Why do you reckon I am still here in crypto if I didn't think so!

Problem Monero has is that there is very little demand for an anonymity for which the reliability is unprovable. It is a marketing utility problem, which Bitcoin doesn't suffer. Even if we did implement provable anonymity (e.g. Zerocash not Zerocoin), it still not clear if markets for anonymity would be great, especially if the decentralized, permissionless attribute isn't assured, because the government can simply take control over centralized mining and force the anonymity to be stripped off. OTOH, companies are saying that privacy is very important to them and perhaps they do not mean hiding from the NSA. And public block chains using encryption are superior conceptually to private block chains using perimeters defenses because even sneakernets fail (e.g. Stuxnet). But the things corporations want privacy on are the block chain 2.0 features that Ethereum is working on. The corporations aren't interested just in crypto currency alone as that doesn't have much utility to them. Cryptonote (especially combined with Confidential Transactions that hide values) is a very technologically interesting concept, but without any significant utility in the markets.

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And hide all your metadata perfectly (which is virtually impossible).

And trust the owner of that mixing site you are using (which is stupid as shit, especially given the NSA can serve him with a gag order or hack his servers).

That is Zerocoin, not Zerocash. Zerocoin is a mixer only for sending coins to your self and delinking, thus it is subject to all metadata correlation breakage the same as for Monero (Cryptonote coins and ShadowCash and everything else!).

Only Zerocash hides everything and thus is immune to metadata correlation. Zerocash mints zerocoins (which are not the same as the coins in Zerocoin). Zerocoin was created by some of the same people who created Zerocash, but they are totally different technologies. Zerocash is much more powerful anonymity because all the coins and all the actions (e.g. transfer payment to another) are totally hidden in one big blob.


It is not even clear if Zerocash will work in a real world implementation for scalability and DDoS reasons (and maybe other issues).

But none of that absolves the fact that Monero is fundamentally (mostly) useless for the reasons I stated upthread.

I think OP was asking about digital currency

i like XDN http://digitalnote.org.

Truly anonymous

Untraceable truly anonymous DigitalNote transactions and encrypted information transfers in decentralized p2p network.

Blockchain analysis resistant

DigitalNote blockchain is resistant to any kind of analysis. All you XDN transactions and messages transfers are unlinkable.

What are the most secure and secret coins to anonymity? So just created this work for the coin.

edit: sorry for my bad england

That is Zerocoin, not Zerocash. Zerocoin is a mixer only for sending coins to your self and delinking, thus it is subject to all metadata correlation breakage the same as for Monero (Cryptonote coins and ShadowCash and everything else!).

Only Zerocash hides everything and thus is immune to metadata correlation. Zerocash mints zerocoins (which are not the same as the coins in Zerocoin). Zerocoin was created by some of the same people who created Zerocash, but they are totally different technologies. Zerocash is much more powerful anonymity because all the coins and all the actions (e.g. transfer payment to another) are totally hidden in one big blob.


It is not even clear if Zerocash will work in a real world implementation for scalability and DDoS reasons (and maybe other issues).

But none of that absolves the fact that Monero is fundamentally (mostly) useless for the reasons I stated upthread.

Zerocash improves on an earlier protocol, Zerocoin, developed by some of the same authors, both in functionality (Zerocoin only hides a payment's origin, but not its destination or amount) and in efficiency (Zerocash transactions are less than 1KB and take less than 6ms to verify).

Zerocoin implementation that is supposed to launch early this year:
http://moneta.cash/technology.html
https://github.com/MonetaOfficial/moneta

I think it is basically a rebranded version of Zerovert, which was a closed-source implementation released last year. One of the creators is one of Matthew Green's former students.

With that being said, it's still unproven technology, and I think there are some issues with launching the currency in a trustless manner, so for now Monero is probably most bestest.

And don't use the same receiving address more than once or twice.