Bitcoin Forum

There are several anon coins in crypto land, each with their own unique features such Masternodes, mixing, Tor and i2p integration and many more. However, it is up to debate whenever they are truly anonymous or not. Based on the coins you've tried and experienced with, I would like to know which one of them from the poll would be the one of your choosing that meets the above purpose.

Make sure to make your vote and express your opinion by replying here.  ;D

I would vote for v.cash
https://github.com/john-connor/papers/blob/master/chainblender.pdf

I do like Anoncoin's i2p integration tho

Thanks for your reply. Honestly, I have never thought that Vcash would start implementing anonymity features. It seems that it might become a very popular crypto. I'll add this one toward my investment list.  :)

I am also interested in the answer of this. I heard that zcash might be the one but it is not online yet. The founder of that is one of the original cypher punks if I have my facts correctly.

At this point.. none of them are.

That is the right answer.

Cross Referencing Data is the reason why all anon solutions fails.

Your IP address is not anon,
Your Browser info is not anon,
Your Email Address is not anon,
Your Bank Account which you linked is not anon,
Your address where you mailed or received goods is not anon,
there are no guarantees the person that did business with you did not sell your identifiable information.

All anon solutions will fail til they can solve all of the above.

 8)

Good points. I was concerned about this when using an "anon" cryptocurrency and so I think that until now they are called anonymous just to bring hype and a false impression of it. Still, about the IP address and email address not being anon is a thing that brings me doubt since I've always thought you could use Tor to hide your IP and an email service from the deep web (which you can send messages by using PGP). Or, maybe Tor has been compromised and thus there would be no real anonymity. Just my opinion.  :)

I chose Monero , but only because its all I have been reading about lately and I'm optimistic. Looks like other people chose similarly

Digitalnote lets you send anonymous messages and has untraceable transactions.

You can try it for free since we are doing a guveaway here!: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1575551.0

1. i2p
2. secure browser
3. i2p email address
4. use cash and use the i2p exchange or btc-e
5. a real pickle, i don't think any coin can solve this

Hmm I too think thats not something a coin itself can or should solve. I believe there will be a way to deliver stuff without you having to give your address, or that of someone else. The basic technology that could make that happen already exist... but I think it is many years away from actually being a practical thing... so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Real Problem is you can't make a transaction or communication with someone or a website , that does not leave some residue of information, that can't be cross referenced by Big Brother to pinpoint you. The day of personal privacy died over 30 years ago.

 8)

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/06/28/fbi-is-trying-to-hide-their-tor-exploit-for-good/
http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/constitutional-rights/fbi-labled-tor-browser-users-criminals/

FBI and other Government agencies have had access since it was created.
Just between us ;), the reason the original US Naval Programmer dropped it , was he discovered an underlying flaw , and instead of wasting all of that time and effort , it was released to the public, where criminals would think they were safe but the reverse was true, everything they were doing was being recorded.
It was also a way to get evidence , so they could create a network of intelligence gathering assets from those threaten with jail time, work for me or go to jail is a very compelling argument.

 8)

Then there is value to the coin that can solve this. Clearly the solution is something we have not thought of before because most of think that it cannot be solved. I am optimistic that it can because there are brilliant and clever people tackling the problem right now.

Bitcoin is not truly anonymous that is why i need cryptomixer, [banned mixer] is bitcoin mixing services and it is makes me anonymous when i use bitcoin. Even if 0.001 BTC i am keep be anonymous by [banned mixer]

 :D :D :D
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Rofl_6738d5_1054861.jpg

 8)

Presently there are no 100% truly Anonymous Crypto Currencies... But We hope to change that... :) Keep an eye on Darknet...








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We are running a Giveaway of a custom Stakebox and 10k DNET

Get the details:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1262920.msg15809083#msg15809083

Cool advertisement plug, bro...too bad you need to be completely public to participate in this 'darknet' giveaway LOL  ::)

Could you add DigitalNote to this list... encrypted and anonymous messaging.

None of these are currently anonymous.

They have identity-obscuring features, which are nice, but all of them currently fall embarrassingly short of expectations. Not to say that effort hasn't been well spent, just that if you expect an 'anonymous' currency today, it's not on that list, or any list you could make right at this point.

That said, some on that list are capable of being "truly anonymous", some day, provided they are backed by a community that's willing to comply with a regular hard fork.

This of course requires both having a community and active development.

That would be Monero with I2p integration and a rolling hardfork--security is tough, but in the right hands, it adapts to the threat, rather than into it.

Thanks for letting me know about this altcoin. It has been a long time since I haven't looked into it, but since it provides untraceable transactions, I will research more about it.



Thanks for sharing these useful resources. It turns out that there may never be a secure and anonymous way to stay hidden from prying eyes. Tor has been compromised, hence the only thing left would be i2p (unless the government has found a way through it too). That is why I think that true privacy will never be achieved since the government will always find a way to go through it.  :(

from http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/constitutional-rights/fbi-labled-tor-browser-users-criminals/ (http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/constitutional-rights/fbi-labled-tor-browser-users-criminals/)

The above quote is incorrect. Here is the link to the document in question. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2819194-frcr16-8mad.html (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2819194-frcr16-8mad.html)

By the way the fact that one may not be able to secure one's home against a direct hit with the Tsar Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) is not a valid reason to not invest in home security.

None. Will never exist. That is if you mean truly anonymous from the NSA.

Your question should be which offers the highest amount of anonymity mixing. The answer is Zerocash.

well if you will not try to be anonymous yourself then you are right about it, in my opinion cryptos in this way will never be anonymous, though for me bitcoin is anonymous enough

I think that there is no crypto which is completely anonymously because of some crypto wallets like coinbase which arehard destroying tgat anonynously like example they told about kickass to fbi

I'm not so sure about the 'will never exist' meme scare tactic.

Fully traceable transactions are an invention of the 20th and 21st centuries, and even less than 15% of that time has more than a few percent that are even fully traceable.

Won't exist for a generation is fine to hold as an opinion, but won't exist ever seems a little out of touch.

Exactly. There may not be a truly anonymous currency against the NSA, but at least I can keep my privacy from the rest of the world.




I think he refers that there will never exist an anonymous cryptocurrency since the NSA will always figure out a way to get around it and spy on you. Just take a look of what happened with the Tor exploit lately. Speaking of which, I hope that new Selfrando (https://www.ics.uci.edu/~perl/pets16_selfrando.pdf) feature on Tor will help make it more anonymous.

I'm of the opinion that believing that the government is inefficient and often incorrect to the point it will ruin itself, while simultaneously believing that the government will always find a way to track you constitute doublethink.

Not that both opinions are independently incorrect, of course. Just that people who present both opinions in their arguments as valid points, imo, have a bit of explaining to do.

My understanding of the recent TOR issues was that there was a Firefox exploit. TOR itself remains vulnerable to mainly the same exit/entrance exploit requiring majority ownership that it did before. I'm not generally surprised about hearing that an internet browser being prone to vulnerabilities. TY for the article though I needed something to read today :)

In this case these are bad news for some coins.

If NSA has enough incentive to unwind all the data and then target you, they can. They always have rubber hoses as a last resort.

But if the anonymity mix set is large and diverse enough, and you are a small fish, it might not be efficient or plausible from an efficiency standpoint for them to do so.

My point is that if you think anonymity will 100% protect you from illegal (or even legal but in competition with TPTB) activities, then there won't exist such "truly anonymous" where "truly" is interpreted to mean "100% certain protection".

But lack of 100% certainty is akin to life itself. Nothing is certain in life, except death (and even the upper bound timing of that might not be certain in the future).

Edit: if someone could enumerate all the ways one could be unmasked and then show mathematically it was implausible+intractable (with known computing power) to unwind in any way a certain set of anonymity mixes, perhaps one could make a claim of true anonymity. But as of now, I do not see that as realistic but I haven't actually tried to formalize all that (seems daunting and implausible just from the rabbit holes I have climbed down and analyzed). The holistic math on anonymity (over all possible attack vectors) is very fuzzy and I'm presuming it will remain so, because I presume the set of possible attack vectors is unbounded.

Although I have not tried using these cryptonote coins,but I was amazed on their white paper,they claimed to be a real anonymous,unfortunately since I trade for profit I cannot trade from the exchange that I am using since cryptonote algos are not accepted on this kind of exchange..

Why do people think the dsrknet is this magic place ! It really isn't. Why would it work better there ? If anything it will be slower.

Nothing is 100% anonymous but we can always try make it almost impossible to find. With enough time you can find just about anything. But I dont see why this is so important are you guys planning on buy like weapons and half an army ??

Yeah. I've seen that Monero is among the most popular cryptonote coin (apart from being the one that has the most votes on this poll) and yet, it may be one of the most anonymous cryptos out there, but not 100% anonymous of course. Still, I have seen prices of anonymous cryptocurrencies rise over time like Dash and Monero. I remember when Monero was used to be worth $0.62 USD. Those were really good times. Thanks to the price of XMR today, I have made pretty good profit.  :D

I dont get the alure of Monero, sure it's a very popular coin and has a large community -- I accredit its current market cap due to the community surrounding it, not its utility. I'll explain why.

The primary point of anonymous transactions is to use it to buy 'things' you want to purchase anonymously. Depending on what you're purchasing or selling, the stakes may be incredibly high for getting caught, anonymity is absolute paramount.  If you simply want to 'wash' some coins for financial anonymity, well, bitcoin mixers suffice for most people's uses. However, if you're running a shop or ordering certain products that may not be legal in your country, you need extreme financial anonymity and an anonymous decentralized platform with end to end encrypted communications.  The currency is 1/3rd of the recipe for true protection. As far as I know, most of these coins only offer that 1/3rd portion, Dash, Monero, etc.

If a (dark net) marketplace doesn't support Monero, it's use is very limited. Sure you can use it to transact financial payments anonymously, but I don't know of any popular 'marketplaces' that support it. Even at that point you've still got to deal with pgp encryption (a hurdle for technically-inept people) of communication and use a centralized platform that suffers from DDOS attacks, exit scams, and the never ending cat and mouse game between the market owners and three letter agencies.

For these numerous reasons i'm more a fan of projects like ShadowCash, as they're going to combine the currency with an OpenBazaar-like p2p anonymous platform (run on tor and/or i2p) with encrypted messaging, etc., all done behind the scenes in a highly user-friendly manner.  At that point you have a truly useful anonymous currency with a decentralized anonymous marketplace and end to end encrypted messaging platform... now that is a powerful piece of software if you ask me.

As a side note I'm not a big fan of Dash either, masternodes are a potential weak point for anonymity.

Thanks for sharing your opinion about Monero and other anonymous cryptocurrencies. Seeing ShadowCash myself (as I'm also hold SDC coins) I think that it will be really huge once its decentralized marketplace comes out. It will provide a whole new way of buy and selling stuff in a decentralized, and most of all anonymous exchange. This may increase the interest of black markets, thus making SDC a much more valuable coin than what it is right now. Also, it has a very nice GUI with very powerful features so this crypto has a very bright future.  :)

XMR.TO offers the utility you are talking about for Monero--even Peter Todd uses it.

/sc-was-shened

Is this the site: https://xmr.to/ ?

Coin mixing? I checked out the site and saw 0 innovation or 'utility' beyond what's offered by bitcoin mixing services. You still have 2/3rds of the equation I laid out that is not addressed. A celebrity plug as an example means nothing to the efficacy or utility of a product.

I really loved this tid bit on their site:

"Do you log IPs?
Yes, we do. This is partially because it helps for support and maintenance, and partially because it's a royal pain to ensure that they are purged from all server logs everywhere. :)

It is, in fact, irrelevant whether or not we chose to log IPs. Our hosting service may anyway be logging our traffic, and their logging policy is not in our control. (This is where all the "anonymous" VPN providers lie to you…)

In summary: use TOR or I2P to be fully anonymous."

So really i'm back to square one with that one.

The Shadow platform will take care of all of these things in the background for you, making it much harder for someone to 'fuck up' on their anonymity and doxx themselves.

zcash has a chance to win as the most anonymous coin. But it has not yet been released. They have one of the best development teams in the cryptosphere so it is good to wait for this project to be officially online with their mainnet.

I'm very much looking forward to ZCash, but again, like Monero i'd like to know what their plan is for utility beyond just being an anonymous currency.  I haven't read into the whitepaper much but I know they use ring signatures for their anonymity too (like XMR and SDC). Cryptography isn't my area of expertise, but to my knowledge, the anonymity methods used by Monero, ShadowCash, and ZCash I believe are all on a similar level of anonymity.  If someone could speak to this, and confirm or disprove, that'd be great.

Guess you pass (can you go 2 for 2?).

shadowcash developer:

--failure to recognize a flaw (when a Monero cryptographer spelled it out for you) [  ]

--no expertise in cryptography [ X ]

Nice straw man reply, Mr fungible.

This developer with quote "no expertise in cryptography" has built a far superior solution than using xmr.to/ that you are peddling here.

I mean what sort of joke is that, I have to trust a 3rd party website to make an anonymous trade.

I was the first developer to take a look at this vulnerability, and we immediately recognized the flaw  described in the mathematics.
What you're saying is simply untrue, https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/issues/25#issuecomment-182977494

A flaw in theory doesn't immediately mean that it's applicable to the software in question.
I did not code our ring signature implementation so it took some time to find all the details about the OpenSSL libraries we use.

I remember the shadowcash team denying shen's bounty (a "how dare he make this public!" response) and then claiming their test results came back fine--my memory isn't that short (your participation in the events is overshadowed by the group's response--maybe get a better crew).

And just for the record: are you a cryptographer?

@icebreaker, I seem to remember you had a rundown of this fiasco.

Lol calling for backup.

If it was a fiasco then we can thank you guys for taking full advantage.

That's five minutes of my life I'm not getting back--good luck with your exit strategy.

At least you found yours.  :)

I'll help you refresh your memory.
https://blog.shadowproject.io/2016/02/12/deanonymize-shadow/

We didn't claim our "test results came back fine", we claimed that after 10 hours of messing with OpenSSL libs that we hadn't been able to confirm that the vulnerability was a fact.
This was because our cryptographer wasn't online at the time.

I'm not a cryptographer in the sense that I can create my own cryptographic schemes, but I am capable of comprehending the inner workings of elliptic curve cryptography and most cryptographic schemes that involve diffie-hellman key exchanges at their core. As I programmer I am capable of working with cryptographic libraries and implementing well-documented schemes.

I'll also point that the bug in our system also corresponds to the poorly documented schematics in the inititial CryptoNote whitepaper surrounding the way keyImages are created.
The documentation was so bad that Shen even had to do a second writeup about how they indeterministically map hashes to the curve, https://github.com/ShenNoether/ge_fromfe_writeup/blob/master/ge_fromfe.pdf
The bug was something very small that could've been easily overlooked by anyone doing an implementation based on that paper, but the effects were rather big on the other hand.

Also just FYI, most of the transactions happening on Shadow are still public transactions due to exchanges. On top of that there was only a small portion of ring signature compared to the vast amount of tokens. Of the tokens in existance something < 25% was affected because most HODLers don't move their coins around.

We also never denied Shen his right to the bounty, we did question the applicability but in the end we decided to pay it out. I took 4 days to confirm he was eligible for the bounty and compared to other bounty programs that's rather fast.

--

On the other hand I am confident that our ring signature scheme is secure now, the crucial part in all ring signatures is the keyImage and those have had a thorough review.
The forming of the actual "ring" is not as error-prone as the keyImage and is harder to "fuck up".

for me is really anonymous to be honest and i think that if you use the required software then you can be completely anonymous when using your bitcoins

It certainly is not, but I admit it fully. :)

Even with it not being my area of expertise I can look at something like XMR.TO and know i'm staying away from it. Way to leap frog over that one though. If your critique of the SDC project is to bring up something from the past that is now moot then I don't see what further discussion there is to be had, especially when that argument has been ended at this point.  

I've laid out in a very easy to understand way why I am a fan of the ShadowProject that stems beyond just the currency itself. If anonymous financial transactions are all someone wants then there are a handful of cryptos that will suffice, Monero being one of them. I for one prefer to invest in and back a project that will be more than just targeting a portion of a market (just anon txs), rather than the market as a whole (anon mkt, encrypted msgs, etc.).

Before things go fully live with the entire project I know there will be a third party code audit.  I know the team and how they work and I can assure you they will have additional sets of eyes to look over everything beforehand.


Bitcoin only offers pseudo-anonymity.  It wasn't designed with anonymity in mind, and that's ok.  Bitcoin mixing services work for most people's needs, but there is still the possibility that with someone using enough computing power and combinatorics they could "unwind" the knot created by those services and see who sent what--i'm not a fan of that.

Agree. But still, Bitcoin could achieve a level of anonymity if Dark Wallet becomes a success once its stable release goes to the public. I was testing it a few days ago, and it seems very promising. Also, it would be great to use Bitcoin mixing services on the dark net instead of the clear net for better privacy.

By the way, I saw the XMR.to site and it looks pretty interesting. The only thing that I do not like is that it says that they log your ip. Still, there could be a way around this using Tor or i2p. Just my opinion.  :)

Dark Wallet is an option, but still all you've done is created anonymized transactions, which have been around for years now. You can mix coins on the dark net, you just use the onion link on the mixing sites instead of their clear net URLs.

XMR.to has done nothing innovative or different, in fact it appears to be an even bigger hassle than just mixing your BTC on one of the mixer sites via Tor. None of these services or coins offer a true seamless solution to actual anonymous and decentralized ecommerce. The darknet is a $5-10 billion+ market, add on top of that other people who want to buy or sell non-illegal things anonymously and without the interference of Ebay or Etsy and you're talking a huge market cap. This is the point i'm trying to make.  You have one project that could potentially address these issues and it's current market cap is around $1.6MM.  That to me is worth putting some money behind; even if it only captures a fraction of the total market share you'd see an ROI of unprecedented heights.

Thanks for your reply. Most recently, I have seen that Bitcoin devs are working into implementing Confidential Transactions into Bitcoin, which may improve its privacy. As for XMR, I have noticed that it has increased in price substantially right after the announcement that dark net markets will begin accepting it. I guess that anonymous cryptocurrencies do have a bright future after all, especially Monero in my opinion.  ::)

I think there is no altcoin or any crypto that you can be anonymous.. almost have a transaction history just like bitcoin.
I dont know if there is new altcoin right now that trully anobymous..

i voted for monero, but navcoin seems a good one too. they have a good bounty to anyone capable of trace a transaction and still nobody could do it.

Monero is doing really good right now, especially after the announcement that it will be used by 2 major dark markets. Prices have been increasing over the last days leaving it close to the $10 mark. Seems like there is a bright future for XMR...or maybe not.  ::)

Well we will see that price if it will stay long at this level.. i am late that to herer that XMR right now is growing but this is just like the same as last year that they are increase again back and drop again. .

That could probably happen soon. Still, I think that once ZCash comes public, it will be a major competitor against XMR and DASH and then we'll see which coin is the best anon coin. The one that gets adopted most by the dark markets will be the one at the top, in my opinion.  ;D

How will be the distribution? And about the algo, will be possible GPU mining?

What about vcash? I read that they have something called "chain blender" that also anonymizes transactions but I have not read about it thoroughly. Maybe that should also be included in the list?

i think altcoin is monero xmr
is truely anonymous, same with bitcoin is founder moenero xmr nobody is who is monero found

This.

There is a difference between "open and public for everyone to see", and "even if all state-sponsored agencies are after you with unlimited budget, you have the guarantee that even if you are sloppy, they'll never find out".

It is not because your house will not stand a nuclear impact, that you shouldn't have a roof.

Also, the more anonymity is generalized, the harder it is to "go fishing" after potential victims.  Crypto in general is a way to make life so difficult for the attacker, that it isn't worth it, or that he'll run out of resources before succeeding. It doesn't mean that there is a guarantee that an attacker with essentially unlimited means will not succeed.  This is true for crypto, and for security in general.

ZCash uses the Equihash hashing algorithm for PoW, which is ASIC resistant. I'm not sure about it being mined in GPUs but if its going to be mineable by CPU, then it should be able to be mined with a GPU. This algo relies more on the amount of RAM you have for hashing.

You can learn more about the PoW algo here: https://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/blogs-media/equihash-asymmetric-proof-of-work-based-generalized-birthday-problem.pdf (https://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/blogs-media/equihash-asymmetric-proof-of-work-based-generalized-birthday-problem.pdf)



Sure. VCash also has an anonymizing technique which I've found about it a couple of days ago. Seems that they are heading towards the anon direction. Now the competition will be fierce, as once ZCash comes out it the battle will be between Dash, Monero, and Zcash in order to become the crypto that will be most used by the darknet markets.

By the way, for those looking more into VCash's anon technique you can read it here: https://github.com/john-connor/papers/blob/master/chainblender.pdf (https://github.com/john-connor/papers/blob/master/chainblender.pdf)