It's time for the big showdown, I have investigated thoroughly which currency is the most anonymous and fungible of them all. I have narrowed the list down to the 2 biggest ones: Dash and Monero. Of course there are dozens of allegedly "anonymous" currencies out there but are they really that or that is just some marketing gimmick? Because according to my research most other coins are pure snake oil, that have nothing to do with helping the community achieve fungible transactions, and have mostly to do with just enriching the owners of the currency. So I don't have to time waste on the rest of them.
Now before I talk about Dash and Monero I want to talk briefly about Zcash and in general the z-SNARK protocol that it and other coins have started using.
Zcash
Well I am not a big fan of Zcash. It's not a trustless setup, they openly admit that the setup requires trust, which is the core antithesis of cryptocurrencies, might as well just use central banks. The entire setup is basically based on some guy roaming around the desert on a roadtrip and playing with his laptop essentially setting up the initialization. You can't make this up. While Peter is a good reputable person from the Bitcoin Core team, this event is really as hilarious as it gets.
So really the security of a potentially billion $ worth cryptocurrency is based on some desert trip and doing cryptography in the desert. Of course setting aside the funny nature of this event, there are also obvious flaws with this setup:
- For instance we don't know if the laptop was secure, we don't know if the footage was edited or not (sorry a video footage is not sufficient trustworthy evidence for a project of this magnitude), and there are millions of other ways this could have been compromised.
So essentially we don't know whether there is a backdoor in this currency or not, since it's totally untransparent, might as well just be closed source, I mean what is the point in making it open source anyway if the core initialization system is "dark".
I think it's totally against the core philosophy of decentralized open source trustless currencies, so I personally don't like it.
Bitcoin
While Bitcoin is technically the most secure cryptocurrency in the world due to it's simplicity and network size, it's certainly not privacy friendly. People who say that Bitcoin is anonymous are morons, it's hardly better than your bank account, in fact it's worse from a privacy standpoint, because a bank account is surveilled 24/7, it might not be in bank secrecy friendly countries, but in Bitcoin anyone can surveill all your transactions not just the bank workers or the Government, so it's a lot worse.
Though Bitcoin never really meant to be entirely private, it was mostly meant to be as a settlement system or a payment system, hence the division between BTC or BCH. So BCH continues to be a payment system with big transaction capacity, while BTC will outsource that to secondary chains, Lightning Network, which might improve it's privacy but at the cost of giving up sovereignty since this will rely on trusted 3rd parties holding funds in multisignature. So Bitcoin is either way doomed from a privacy standpoint. And those Mixers are very dubious, scammy, or outright criminal. I'd certainly not use those.
Dash vs Monero
So when I did my research I have specifically asked the pros and cons of the privacy technology behind their own coin from each community. And while I got honest answers from the Monero community, they openly admitted the advantages and flaws of Monero, I got dodgy or kind of trollish answers from the Dash community, they evaded the answer, and started insulting me, accusing me of being a troll, when I just went there unbiased, looking for answers.
It started out like this:
Ok so he said that Dash and other coins can scale better, but he avoided the privacy answer for Dash, slightly hinting that Dash is not that anonymous, and also implying that anyone who needs total privacy must be a criminal. Well that is a very dishonest answer. I mean these guys must probably all think that only drug dealers or criminals need privacy, well let me enlighten them:
I have replied:
Then I got a frustrated answer totally switching the subject
So basically he showed me some equations how Dash's privacy would work in theory since there are many Masternodes and even though we have to rely on their trusted setup, since they can easily surveill and log any transaction that goes through them, essentially making Dash totally non-anonymous, he totally missed the point. Plus he he implied that Bitcoin is no better so Dash must be good then? A total relative privation fallacy. While dodging my question.. Then some others have highlighted that Monero has scaling issues, but again totally changing the subject and no answering my question.
So I have replied:
I of course was referring to this thing, because until Governments are logging all internet data, possibly snooping up Masternode data as well, it doesn't even matter if the Masternode is honest, the connection can easily be surveilled and all the data logged even without the node’s knoweldge by the ISP for example.
Nobody answered to this question, because this is where the entire system falls apart. Dash solely relies on thousands of Masternodes to mix the coins together to break off the link, but if every single step is logged and surveilled, then it’s all pointless. Doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 1 m Masternodes, even the guy said that in the new Dash version not just Masternodes can mix, it will be everyone, so even if there are 1m nodes, what does it matter? All data is potentially logged, so this means that anonymity = 0.
So I got no answer, I asked it again:
Now they replied with this:
Looks like things have started heating up. He responded to me very disrespectfully, mockingly, while totally ignoring my earlier question, where I pointed out that the number of nodes doesn’t matter if all data is logged, he regurgitated the same nonsense. Plus he is already insulting other guys there, very interesting. So it looks like character attacks are the way the Dash community answers to objective questions.
Now things really started going crazy, I got replies like this:
Holly shit! I am not fucking with you, this is the kind of replies that I got. It is all archived here
So here I am trying to get some honest answers out of the community, they dodge answers, then when I ask then again they become defensive and start spewing nonsense about Aliens & Illuminati while insulting me in a trollish fashion. You can’t make this shit up.
It looks like the Dash community is made up of complete morons, I mean I can’t get a simple yes or no answer out of them without spinning it or dodging it.
Why are they so defensive again? Doesn’t truth win in the end anyway? If their PrivateSend technology is so great, then why not address my points in a calmly objective manner?
Or do they have something to hide, and they know that their technology is inferior, inconsistent and weak, so they have to rely on bullying anyone who questions them, insulting them, changing subjects. Totally dishonest ways of arguing with people.
Of course of course, it’s not honest to put the entire community under the same label just because a few morons act childishly, however this is not the first instance of this, not just me but anyone else who tries to argue there will receive the same hospitality. I welcome you to try arguing with these people.
And setting this drama aside, there is indeed true evidence out there, don’t take my word for it, showing the pros and cons of each of these currencies, and it really looks like Dash is not what it seems to be:
Privacy Conclusion
The actual evidence behind the strength of their privacy is pretty simple, so I could just have talked about this, but I really wanted to show you how desperate and defensive people get if they know they are on the losing team but try to defend it anyway.
Monero has sound cryptography behind it, while Dash is a snake-oil from a privacy standpoint. Dash is like a Bitcoin Mixer, perhaps a little bit better, but it’s privacy is just an illusion, and most likely a marketing gimmick. And it’s not just dishonest to advertise something as private which is not, but also dangerous.
If some civil rights activist in some oppressive totalitarian country were to use it in the assumption to be private then that could cost him his life since the tyrant can easily trace him. Activists will risk their lives, and if they get snake oil security, well that is a very evil thing don’t you think?
Monero Scalability:
Actually despite what these clowns were saying, Monero is scalable, it can scale just like Bitcoin, perhaps with some additional challenges, but nothing that the Monero team couldn’t figure out with their actual hired scientist and development team:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/5o2ccf/monero_scalability
- https://getmonero.org/resources/research-lab
Monero uses state of the art cryptography has a team of actual cryptographers and scientists probing it for vulnerabilities (where do you see that elsewhere?), and it actually has a very community oriented funding and development platform where anyone can participate and crowdfund ideas:
So even if there are issues now or things that you don’t like, they can be easily changed and fixed. It’s not just some coins used by criminals that these clowns are trying to imply, it’s actually the next step in the evolution of the blockchain, a coin that has complete fungibility and privacy guaranteed.
I mean why can’t privacy be guaranteed? Aren’t we tired of these half-baked solutions. I think it’s time for the real deal now.
So Monero wins the showdown, by a huge margin. While Dash’s privacy is a snake oil, there can still be some value there since Dash is community oriented too, but it doesn’t even come close to Monero.
Dash organizes it’s funding and development through Dash Central (totally not centralized of course). It’s really ridiculous how centralized it is, the way the developers are paid and the funds go directly to central authorities, it makes Dash look like a Corporation basically.
While I have no problem with businesses in crypto, I don’t like the idea of a Corporation running a private currency, it sounds like a central bank, and isn’t this the whole opposite of what we want?
I think the community and the currency itself has to be totally decentralized, and trustless and private, and that is only achievable with Monero at this point.
Sources:
- Dash logo by Dash community , CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- https://bitcointalk.org
