Who are the main competitors to Monero? I mean technology wise. Is there another crypto with a better privacy technology?
Bitcoin transacted via the Lightning Network, using onion-routed transactions and other privacy features. (All done over Tor for network-layer privacy, of course—of course, all on your own node and
not with a custodial wallet.) Or other advanced Bitcoin privacy techniques; but I will leave it at Lightning.
Transacting off-chain is strictly superior to using cryptographic techniques to hide information recorded in an append-only public ledger. What is never on the blockchain doesn’t need to be hidden there! This also means that no metadata is recorded on the blockchain—not even the fact that a transaction occurred around a certain time.
There is one other privacy coin with which I have substantial experience; it is the one considered to be XMR’s main competitor. Its privacy is
theoretically superior to XMR, with a transaction unlinkability set
much larger than any mixin; but it has other problems that have made me miserable with it in practice. Although I still have a small amount (as I also have some XMR), I don’t even want to name it here on the XMR thread. Anyway, I am moving toward a 100% all-Bitcoin privacy setup, for my own part.
I am aware of some recent developments with coins that use MimbleWimble, but have not investigated those due to, again, refocusing on Bitcoin privacy. I don’t know if they are any good.
Many other so-called “privacy coins” are
SCAMS: DASH, DeepOnion, and Verge, for some examples that I have investigated.
SCAMS. AVOID the shitcoins with slick marketing, that do not actually protect your privacy. “Privacy” is a big buzzword; and you should only trust privacy claims that have been thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts.
Anyway, if you need to ask this question, then you should probably just stick with XMR (or get on Lightning with Bitcoin...). Monero has good cryptography. Insofar as I can see, its principal weakness is the size of the unlinkability set for each transaction. As a different factor that is also important, I note that it is the only coin that I know of which has truly decentralized, censorship-resistant mining, on commodity hardware which anybody can buy without exposing an interest in cryptocurrency. (The reason why I myself do not do Bitcoin mining: I can’t buy an ASIC with strong anonymity, and I can’t just use ordinary CPUs.) If there were one altcoin feature that I could steal for Bitcoin, it would probably be RandomX, or some further development thereof. (Yes, Bitcoin mining people, I am aware of all the reasons why that will not happen.)
