…from a privacy standpoint it's not good, and advertising Dash as a private currency is pretty dishonest in my opinion….so on that level I think Monero is better, that's all I said in the article.
@profitgenerator212, Do you even realise you're comparing an encrypted blockchain with an unencrypted one ?
If you had done - and stated that at the start of your "article" - you could have stopped right there because *anything* encrypted is going to be more "private" than its unencrypted equivalent since you're hiding the entire transacting environment under a layer of obfuscation.
Which begs the question...why didn't Satoshi build encryption into bitcoin as a priority ? Why was
transparency the priority over
obfuscation ?
You might find that a bit difficult to answer as long as you cling so religiously to this ridiculous assumption:
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
Lets analyse this statement for a moment.
A bank account is “defined” by a contract of statutory ownership. Its balance is both nominated AND public, since it’s open to 3rd party human beings who act as auditors and endorsers of the transactions therein. What Satoshi did was to break the link with an “owner” to establish the following properties for a blockchain balance:
• there is no longer any statutory owner, balances are instead controlled by a keyholder who remains undefined right up until the point of deployment of the private key in order to “spend” the funds
• ‘accounts’ are no longer nominated
• the trusted 3rd party is removed and the public is now both auditor and endorser of value directly (by way of markets)
• although the blockchain itself is transparent, recourse is always needed to off-chain information to know anything about the nature of the transaction or the transactees, even if addresses are linkable
The result of these subtle but significant changes was *anonymity*. As stated above, you need off-chain information in every case to make any associations with human beings. Even if you happen to have it and can associate an address with an individual, as soon as that balance moves to a different address you’re straight back to square one. You once again need recourse to off-chain sources to rediscover anything about that new address. You can’t even know whether it’s still under the control of the original keyholder or a new one. Furthermore, if the address is a freshly created one there won’t even be any off-chain information to help you either.
It is therefore
nothing like a bank account. Satoshi implemented this decoupling of ownership and “control” in order support the one thing that underpins Bitcoin’s value more than any other - TRANSPARENCY.
It is against this background that Dash’s privacy model is prioritised and that’s where your comparison might have been appropriate. For a start, Dash values “anonymity” over “privacy” which is something that Monero/Cryptonote does not. Dash maximises the anonymity of an address balance while
also maximising the transparency of the transacting environment to provide high fidelity for BOTH keyholders and NON keyholders. An encrypted blockchain doesn’t attempt to decouple those priorities, it simply buries the entire transacting environment - warts an’ all - with the following results:
See:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg17896089#msg17896089Anonymity and fungibility.Your “article” makes no attempt to distinguish these terms, yet they are as distinct as “cash” and “credit”. A private transaction is one that no-one can see (in terms of its key components: originating balance before, originating balance after, target balance before, target balance after). An anonymous transaction is one that everyone can see but not glean any off-chain information from. With that in mind, “privacy” is not always the preferable of the two since it’s basically another word for obfuscation and obfuscation is toxic to authenticity.
Flights with no radar coverage are more "private" than ones with it. A diamond you trade but never see is more "private" than one that you do. Zipped files are more "private" than unzipped ones, whether their contents are corrupt or not.
Strong or Weak Privacy ?But I am just criticizing it's privacy technology, which is very weak in my opinion.
What you actually mean is, “Dash is not an encrypted blockchain and Monero is”. No disagreement there, but that doesn’t make its privacy “weak”. Monero has a centralised privacy model - its protocol uses a single encryption algorithm to protect the entire blockchain. Dash’s, on the other hand is both transparent AND decentralised. Every mixing transaction is anonymised on a case by case basis using a different set of nodes with arbitrary denominations where actual address balances are used and new addresses are continuously created. Not only that, the fact that entire coin supply is being continuously mixed at random points and times creates analytic ‘firewalls’ on an ongoing basis which keeps it fungible holistically, not just at transaction level. This gives protection even to those not using private send in their own wallets.
Finally, this little gem:
“All data is potentially logged, so this means that anonymity = 0”
Really ? I look forward to your whitepaper on that one. You’ll probably make more bounty money writing it and supplying it to the Dash devs that you will holding either coin.
