Tell me if Dash is a full-fledged anonymous coin? Or, nevertheless, if the main criterion for me is anonymity, then I should pay attention to Monero?
Dash is more focused on settling transactions on its network these days and improving its user experience, but Dash from the start does provide optional privacy on its transactions for users.
With Dash it involves a form of CoinJoin mixing, but then highly optimized, decentralized, secure and with more rounds of mixing. It is called PrivateSend.
The more number of rounds you mix with other participants, the higher the privacy on your transactions. Default number of rounds to mix is 4, which you can raise to 16 rounds.
Lowering the number of rounds to mix below 4, will lower your privacy. After having done your mixing, a PrivateSend balance becomes available for you to use.
Advantage for using Dash PrivateSend : Incredibly fast, once you have build up a PrivateSend balance. PrivateSend transaction will be confirmed, locked against doublespending and spendable
by receiver within 5 seconds. It is also secure and it has very low transaction fees (Dash transaction average fees are between $0.002 and $0.003).
Disadvantage for using Dash Privatesend : Mixing to build up your PrivateSend balance can be slow at times, there are some sporadic low mixing fees (0.0001 Dash) to protect the network against spam
and users need to be aware of PrivateSend limitations (which are inherent to its linkage to CoinJoin).
Those PrivateSend / CoinJoin limitations are :
* Lowering number of rounds of mixing below its default of 4 rounds, will negatively affect your privacy
* Using more then 10 input amounts in a PrivateSend transaction will negatively affect your privacy (a warning is in place inside the wallet)
* Using the exact same amount in a PrivateSend transaction as before the mixing process took place, will negatively affect your privacy
* Using a known / fixed wallet address before and after the mixing, will negatively affect your privacy
Also important to know is that Monero transactions have a default lock time of a certain number of confirmations (10 ?), before getting spendable.
With Dash the PrivateSend transactions are instantly (within 5 seconds) spendable.
With Monero the lock time in their transactions can even be exploited by the sender, by putting a very high number of confirmations on it. This will make it impossible for the receiver to spend it.
It will be the responsibility for Monero users (particularly the receiver) to thoroughly check their transactions to make sure the lock time is not getting exploited by the sender.
Link :
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/README.mdBlockchain-based
Certain blockchain "features" can be considered "bugs" if misused correctly. Consequently, please consider the following:
When receiving monero, be aware that it may be locked for an arbitrary time if the sender elected to, preventing you from spending that monero until the lock time expires. You may want to hold off acting upon such a transaction until the unlock time lapses. To get a sense of that time, you can consider the remaining blocktime until unlock as seen in the show_transfers command.
Leaving such a vulnerability in their codebase and only addressing it through a readme file somewhere on Github, signals to me that their dev team most likely don't even know how to fix it and therefore just shifts the responsibility to its users.
