I'm just going to let out a sigh before getting into this one because it is frankly, quite an interesting topic.

If I'm not mistaken, Dash is the first privacy crypto asset launched in January as a Bitcoin fork, then came Monero and the long list of others. The idea behind these crypto assets is to anonymize user financial operations, thus, make their records invisible. While some have had some success on that path, with Monero being the most recognized. Monero uses a stealth addresses to make transactions invisible-ish.

Although I cannot really comment on how effective it is, some folks however have quite the interest in Monero and while some just use crypto mixers to make their transactions somewhat difficult to trace. The growth of these services led to US sanctions which ultimately exposed most projects and blockchain to be highly centralized given the actions that were taken towards addresses that interacted with these services on the various blockchain.

That said, generally, the cryptocurrency markets and ecosystem has been pretty cold following the hacks and widespread bankruptcy of numerous companies. People are beginning to lose interest and it begs numerous questions like is crypto dead? Is DeFi dead? and our focus today, are privacy coins dead?

I think Yes and No.

Privacy coins are not dead as though they are still pretty much functional but they are dead business models that need something more revolutionary than just "privacy" to stay relevant.

The Analogy - Privacy Coins and Privacy Browsers

Weird comparison? Not really.

You see, when someone compares bitcoin to the USD, you should know better that Bitcoin isn't built to serve the purpose the USD serves, find a better competition then we can talk. When you compare ChatGPT to Google Search Engine as a potential replacement, you clearly miss how ChatGPT might be quite inefficient given how it is fed data, that's a lot cost built up and Google only has to read, understand the key points within, log it and forget until it is requested to do so again.

Given this, the competition doesn't exactly stand a chance. Brave browser and Chrome for example, Brave is all about privacy, and Chrome isn't. Brave blocks third party ads but bribes you to show you ads, hypocrisy? Well, incentivization is the card they are trying Pull to gain advantage in the system but given that as at 2021, 3.2 billion people use chrome while about 57 million people use brave we can't say it is actually winning.

It may seem as an unfair comparison given that Chrome is 14 years running and Brave is 6 years. However, if you wish to compare both technologies, what they offer, you'd realize Chrome is still greatly above Brave. To cite an example, I use Brave and Chrome on my PC and use Brave, Chrome and Samsung Browser on my mobile device. On my mobile device, the most efficient is my Samsung Browser, it is simply light weight. I can't really comment much on the other two for mobile since I barely use them.

But for my PC, Brave is quite bad. How? When Brave is new, it feels quite OK, but the when it begins to log up browsing data, it becomes extremely slow and can literally crash your computer. I cannot spend up to 30 minutes on Brave without crashing. But I can open different windows on my Chrome and all works pretty smoothly. The reality is that Chrome is much more efficient and people will not really care what else there is to it.

Now, when we talk about privacy coins, everyone should know that it really isn't a big deal, crypto is private by design, nobody will know it's you unless you tell, there ain't no ID on a bunch of random strings is there? Even on Hive blockchain, one could create and manage multiple accounts without anyone knowing, it is not a tell, so creating something and pinning the word "private" to it isn't long term relevant because if anything, we all simply care more about the ownership and control we have over these assets than privacy, I mean, most people in fact enjoy letting the world know their wealth, only broke people and criminals tend to want much of this privacy. The average individual really don't mind, and to me, long term, it will not be much of a big deal.

It may still have users, but I highly doubt it will be something to be impressed about unless of course, they can cook up some business model that attracts a new market like Brave managed to tap into the Internet and crypto economy with incentivization because anybody looking for privacy and anonymity would likely put a damn VPN on than rely on a privacy browser as it is called.

Thank you and please leave a comment, your thoughts matter to me