Anonymity, Security and Privacy: Anonymous Cryptocurrency Enhancement Comparsion

[Madychoux]

Great thread, I appreciate it, just wanted to thank you as it's a very nice initiative and a really good job 

[unknownMe]

I'm missing VIAcoin, check https://viacoin.org for their white paper and stuff!

[SafeCoins]

I'm missing VIAcoin, check https://viacoin.org for their white paper and stuff!

Thank you unkownMe,

I checked it out, looks like a nice coin, but does not appear to have any anonymity enhancements.

[shinhurr]

Great thread, I appreciate it, just wanted to thank you as it's a very nice initiative and a really good job 

Indeed, great job... I was thinking of doing something like that but I do not have the necessary knowhow to do so and it seems like a lot of work.
One of the oldest coins named 'Anoncoin' does not seem to be there. I already informed the devs about your thread.
(they are mainly focused on development and less on marketing)

[criminalbee]

I know some coins in terms of anonymity, one thing i know is that Monero is the one who is widely use in darkweb. If im going to invest i would prefer a coin that is widely use like bitcoin.

[coldflame821]

The following is an updated attempt to assess and evaluate:

  1.   Enhancements/Protocols:
  
    a. Anonymous Capabilities / Anonymity
    b. Privacy
    c) Security

  2.   The coins that currently implement these features


Every will be made to assume none of these coins are a complete solution (yet).  Not because they're bad, but because a lot of the other comparison threads out there have been polarized toward one coin as the "solution with all the best end to end features".  

I would really appreciate your thoughts and input on this work in progress, so that together, we can make it even more complicated and unreadable.

https://i.imgur.com/W1iG5Uq.png


Anonymous, Privacy, and Security features are clearly all related to one another, yet in my mind are distinct:
  
Anonymous features ultimately aim for the holding and transacting of a commodity which both requires and releases zero identifying information.
              Buy a pizza.  No receipt, no exchange of information, no record of the pizza or you.
                    There are obvious legal implications to this, causing it to be a "dark" feature.
                          However, this slander assumes that the governing body itself is not "dark", or corrupt.   In many places in the world, Anonymity is a matter of life and death.
                          As such, Anonymity is a double edged sword, aiding both sinister and altruistic efforts.
                          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)
              

Privacy features aim to give ownership of identifying information to individuals/entities who hold or transact a commodity.
              Buy a pizza, there's a record of it but that record is for you (and potentially the pizza shop) only.
                    There is a legal arguement for privacy features.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_law

Security:  If you can hack the thing, you need not worry about Anonymity and Privacy.  Those are out.



Some other attempts at this:  

Full list of anonymous coins
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1025878.0

 [DASH/XDN/XMR/SDC] Comparison between the most known anonymous coins
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=985039.0

Privacy getting important: Verge or Spectrecoin or DeepOnion??
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2397519.0;all

Which cryptocurrency is most anonymous?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2157374.0


https://zcoin.io/zcoins-privacy-tec


Wondering about this one:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2525344.0

Great post! I believe the security and anonymity is still a big problem nowadays, so I guess the coins with such features will dominate in the future.

I've put my faith into DeepOnion since they offer a lot of additional features besides anonymity (Tor integration) and security, such as DeepVault etc. We will see where they can get.

[cryptopan]

Good read,you just saved me a lot of hours of researching to what privacy coin should i invest in.

[unknownMe]

I'm missing VIAcoin, check https://viacoin.org for their white paper and stuff!

Thank you unkownMe,

I checked it out, looks like a nice coin, but does not appear to have any anonymity enhancements.

So far I know it has Tor integrated, transaction trickle and Styx is nearly finished (looking at the Roadmap)

[cryptobobo]

Great comparison between the old and the new privacy coins,now its clear who will be the next XMR.

[kokopopz]

Thank you for your time invested in this comparisson, much appreciated!!

I believe adding an extra feature "marketplace" would also be nice.
Afther all, these coins are made to be spent, so I think a platform for anomymous trade is a very good feature.

This especialy now the deep web is being overrun by LE and all major markets where shut down.

Thank you kokopopz,

I think you're the third person to suggest "marketplace".... So ok...I'll add it haha...but I could use some help coming up with the right "name" for it.

First of all we have to know what the objective is.    I'll throw one out:   To allow private, anonymous, peer-to-peer , and "legal" exchange of goods.   (?)

"legal" is an aweful term...everything's legal somewhere, and everything is illegal somewhere else.   By "legal", I'm implying that it is legal in most developed countries.   And, hopefully, would be the most minimal risk to most users.

Now of course, even the most compliant solution will have legal implications in some places, and as such it should be built to protect the users.   Ie., an otherwise marketplace for Venezuelans to get basic medicine.

Things like account balances can be dangerous.

My concern with the terms "marketplace" and "exchange" is that these are things which are often shut down.    Maybe we have to use that term.  If anyone can think of a better one let me know

How about "e-commerce platform"?
Like you said legality is a very relative concept. So I think you should leave it out of you definition.
That is why an anonymous marketplace is such a beautifull thing, it disables centralized state intervention. In my opinion this is in line with the original intention of bitcoin and all coins on your list. The main purpose of anonymity is maintaining independance and preventing third party medling from other people AND the authorities. So I would not worry too much about the law when discussing anonymous money

[Morbid]

very nice thread. thank you. though perhaps by accident or whatnot anoncoin (ANC) isnt mentioned here. this might be a surprise to most but its very first anonymous coin that got released in 2013. still going strong & is being developed flying low under the radar. at the moment the blockchain is running in i2p, new features are being developed as the team is actively back onto it, so this year hopefully will see some movement in that area..

[nakamote]

We can all the differences between the old and the new privacy coins,this is great we just need to delist the one who are overvalued in the market.

[themathiasmiller]

I just stumbled upon this thread while searching for some undervalued privacy coins and wow I'm really amazed with what you did here, thank you so much for sharing this information and breaking out each of the coin's features this way. You really did help me save a lot of time in my research for my next investment. I really believe that this year will be the year for privacy coins. I've seen a huge interest coming from these kind of projects and I myself am a big fan of this ever since monero was released to the public and when raiblocks moon, I knew that coins with these features will be the next big thing and as a cyrptocurrency enthusiast I honestly think that having coins like this is very beneficial to a lot of users and will really help with the decentralization of the market. Privacy coins are a must to have especially at times like this when privacy is becoming more of a necessity than something we all posses.

[shinhurr]

Does someone have an idea how Anoncoin (ANC) compares to these?
They barely don't do any marketing but are developing again since recently.

[AndersNiggelson]

Does someone have an idea how Anoncoin (ANC) compares to these?
They barely don't do any marketing but are developing again since recently.

I am not an Expert but will try to tell you what I was able to find out.

Anoncoin (ANC) can be used with TOR and I2P. It has quite a nice pre-built package which includes Invisible Internet Project (I2P) out of the box which is nice for beginners.

Concerning coin ownership "first features would be stealth addresses and ring signatures". I hope this helps.

[ac1905]

I'd like to see ANON $ANC compared to the other ones please

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/anoncoin/

[boyjackyou]

This is great,now the new alts has more advanec technology than existing privacy coins,i wonder what coin would replace XMR's position?

[ac1905]

Verge is not a doge coin fork, it's a Peer Coin fork

[opennera]

I think you should check Zoin (ZOI). Zoin has many update on Q1 2018 and mcap < 50mm

[shinhurr]

Monero will never be in danger of anything. Any Monero clone or other coin can do whatever they want but they will never pace with amount Monero development. Monero have 300 contributors to the code, well actually we will soon hear the 2017 report. Developers are all that matters. Other coins can only copy past if they can at all.  They are more then welcomed, because the more the merrier.

I do wonder whether 300 developers can accomplish so much more than a few very bright developers tbh. Software does not necessarily become better or development time does not necessarily go down if you have more developers..
The main thing you need is to align your team for a roadmap, where are you going, which anonymity features will you focus on. You need technical ideas. As far as I heard from talking to devs, the implementations are not extremely complicated. As in all software and if you compare it to software companies.. often a piece of software just grows too big to be competitive with the new small startups or in this case small teams with new ideas who just develop it completely different from the ground up. Do not forget that if a coin is launched, you often are limited with what you can change afterwards.

There is always a risk in software that someone else does better.. And usually the actual revolutionary new thing comes from a very small team.