Comparing Anonymous Coins

[newjack]

Hi,
I'm new to the Alt Coin world. I would like to know: What is the best anonymous alt coin? I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

Ultimately what I hope to do is start an online shop and align it with one Alt Coin that I can really get behind and support. Also I would like to organize a community around said Alt Coin.
One of my concerns is the extreme inflation and deflation of the coins right now, and the fact that many people look at the coins as "investments" rather than a tool to do real transactions for goods and services. So, I guess I'm looking for a coin with a community that is more concerned with price stability as well.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[1714004294]

1714004294

[AlexGR]

Use both to determine what's better for said purpose and then focus on the one you are doing best.

[poornamelessme]

People are simply going to state what coins they own, and that one is the 'best'. So to be honest, expect very few valid replies here.

One of the Cryptonote coins may be the strongest as far as anonymity goes, as ring signatures are pretty solid, but it does have some issues, primarily bloat.  Monero gets all the attention, but Boolberry probably is the better coin -- it has a gui wallet and I believe cut down on some of the bloat issues.

Drk, assuming it passes its audit, would also be considered worthwhile ... especially if they do that Dark Tor thing the dev talked about.

Then you have XC (someone  else would have to give an objective opinion on that one, as I haven't followed it).

There are other coins that claim anonymity, but haven't paid much attention to them ... Pinkcoin claimed it, Cloak sort of had a version working, until they failed their audit as far as it being trustless, and more or less have to start over from the beginning (assuming they even bother at this point). Not sure what other coins claimed anonymity or not, besides the simple mixer types of coins.

Anyway, you'd want a stable coin that people would spend, not worried about it as far as an investment goes. That will be tricky, as pretty much that seems all people do here is consider these things investments. You may wish to wait until Drk gets past RC5 and goes open source, or a cryptonote flavor truly fixes their bloated blockchain issue. And in Monero's case, gets a wallet that an average person would even bother using.

[nsimmons]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

[fluffypony]

I'm one of the Monero Core Team members, so I'll only speak about Monero.

Price stability is not going to happen with Monero any time soon. It's a rapidly evolving space, and in spite of the current trade volume it's still relatively easy for a mid-sized trader to move the market. This is also possible with Bitcoin, so market manipulation shifting the price is something you're going to have to live with one way or another.

Monero also has a completely different RPC API to any of the Bitcoin-derived coins, so integrating it into an ecommerce system will require work, and you won't necessarily be able to just re-use a plugin written for Bitcoin.

Finally, for end users Monero has a high barrier to entry right now. Amazing usability is coming, but it will be a few months before we get to a point where general usability by non-crypto types is possible. You can see some of our efforts to date in the preview of the Monero GUI: http://imgur.com/a/ERheR

On the flipside, Monero is among the very few cryptocurrencies that truly do have cryptographically sound unlinkable and untraceable transactions. Even with a high mixin level (the level of ambiguity used to mix your transaction inputs with other random ones) of, say, 100, your transaction will go through in a minute or two. Our aim with Monero is to make it useful and usable as a medium of exchange and a store of value, not merely to provide an investment vehicle, so that fits in with your goals. Finally, you'll have the advantage of speaking to a technically proficient, generally intelligent community, so there is a marketing benefit.

[fluffypony]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

Unless you're on a very entry-level VPS and the daemon is being killed by the host OS' oomkiller this is incorrect. The daemon is reasonably robust and does not just crash and corrupt the blockchain.

The issue with sync speed is because catch-up is done on an absolute consensus basis - it requires blocks to be received and confirmed from all peers to ensure that those peers are whitelisted (peers that fail to meet this consensus or serve bad blocks that do not verify are dropped and graylisted). This makes it an incredibly robust consensus network, but it also means catch-up is slow and chunky. Bitcoin's catch-up mechanism is based on the longest chain rule - pull blocks from only 1 peer that has the longest chain. The upside is that you'll eventually figure out which peer is honest, as the one that is feeding you bad blocks will eventually be dropped from your peer group when you reach the point where their PoW fails to verify. The downside is that you'll potentially go through huge blockchain reorganisations during this process. We are trying to play with a middle ground that is faster than our "absolute consensus" right now, but also reduces the amount of reorgs needed to catch-up.

I wouldn't say Monero is impossible to use. Download the blockchain from the Bitcointalk OP (which is never more than 8 hours behind), start the daemon, and then use simplewallet to create and transact with your wallet. When a new wallet is created you're given a 24 word seed that you can write down and store somewhere - that's all you need to backup your wallet. No more "just backup your wallet.dat" nonsense:)

[nsimmons]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

Unless you're on a very entry-level VPS and the daemon is being killed by the host OS' oomkiller this is incorrect. The daemon is reasonably robust and does not just crash and corrupt the blockchain.

The issue with sync speed is because catch-up is done on an absolute consensus basis - it requires blocks to be received and confirmed from all peers to ensure that those peers are whitelisted (peers that fail to meet this consensus or serve bad blocks that do not verify are dropped and graylisted). This makes it an incredibly robust consensus network, but it also means catch-up is slow and chunky. Bitcoin's catch-up mechanism is based on the longest chain rule - pull blocks from only 1 peer that has the longest chain. The upside is that you'll eventually figure out which peer is honest, as the one that is feeding you bad blocks will eventually be dropped from your peer group when you reach the point where their PoW fails to verify. The downside is that you'll potentially go through huge blockchain reorganisations during this process. We are trying to play with a middle ground that is faster than our "absolute consensus" right now, but also reduces the amount of reorgs needed to catch-up.

I wouldn't say Monero is impossible to use. Download the blockchain from the Bitcointalk OP (which is never more than 8 hours behind), start the daemon, and then use simplewallet to create and transact with your wallet. When a new wallet is created you're given a 24 word seed that you can write down and store somewhere - that's all you need to backup your wallet. No more "just backup your wallet.dat" nonsense:)

ive been mining monero with my farm for 3 weeks, it is impossible to use. Today bitmonerd crashed, corrupted the blockchain, i downloaded a blockchain 19 days old, 4 hours to sync on a 10mps connection.

my quad core is flatlined while im trying to sync, i have to set firefox to high priority just so its somewhat usuable, 2.6gb of ram lost to updating.

drkcoin, open, sync transfer in 2 min tops.

[amy4to]

in my opnioin  Anonymous Coins is meaningless.When people say something about Anonymous it may illegal or something.And the government won't let any Anonymous coins survive.If we have a choice,i'd rather choose some more reality feature.

[fluffypony]

ive been mining monero with my farm for 3 weeks, it is impossible to use. Today bitmonerd crashed, corrupted the blockchain, i downloaded a blockchain 19 days old, 4 hours to sync on a 10mps connection.

Are you running a private pool? That's a complete edge-case for a normal user - there are issues with getwork and it not obeying OS limits. You have to ramp your ulimits up at the very least, and to the best of my knowledge most pool operators have a scripted daemon shut down and restart every few days. I find it odd that your blockchain is corrupting - the daemon only writes to disk every 8 hours, so unless it is crashing during write a crash wouldn't inherently corrupt the blockchain.

my quad core is flatlined while im trying to sync, i have to set firefox to high priority just so its somewhat usuable, 2.6gb of ram lost to updating.

The whole blockchain is loaded in RAM, so that's understandable. We are working on moving to an embedded database, you can follow the progress on tewinget's branch: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/bc2

drkcoin, open, sync transfer in 2 min tops.

Ah yes - the benefit of inheriting 5.5 years of amazing development in improving and tuning the Bitcoin protocol. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years time Monero will meet or exceed that level of functionality whilst providing cryptographically unlinkable and untraceable transactions.

[BitcoinBadger]

Darkcoins, I think. LTC is struggling hard now. I have read about Capt and it sucks too. Very low rates.

[sgk]

I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

DarkCoin was the first X11 algo coin and also the first anonymous coin featuring Coin Join technology. That's why it got momentum.

Then Bytecoin BCN surfaced, with a completely different 'Cryptonote' anonymous technology. Superior than Coin Join indeed (featuring ring signatures), but there were talks about 80% of the coin having been mined during 2 years of development before the coin surfaced to general public. So everyone thought the BCN was a missed opportunity. So someone cloned it and called it XMR Monero. Everyone jumped on the XMR wagon in the name of 'fair distribution' BS.

Now you decide what is right. DarkCoin and Bytecoin are 'original', Monero is a clone of Bytecoin. There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

If you're not sure, divide your investment among DRK, BCN & CLOAK

[newjack]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the great info, it's helping me get my head around all this.

There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

Kind of a noob question here, but what does "POS" mean in this context?

Also, I don't understand the "instamine" controversy with DarkCoin and how it effects things in the future. Or if it's even a concern at this point.

[poornamelessme]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the great info, it's helping me get my head around all this.

There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

Kind of a noob question here, but what does "POS" mean in this context?

Also, I don't understand the "instamine" controversy with DarkCoin and how it effects things in the future. Or if it's even a concern at this point.

Proof of stake.

Problem with Cloak is, their anonymity solution isn't what they claimed it would be. It's supposed to be trustless, yet isn't. Their audit failed, and now the devs are scrambling to start all over again. I think they are on v3 or something with PoSA.... or in other words, there is no way you should consider that coin currently. Not only is it not at a stable price (it got dumped to smithereens), they don't even have a trustless anonymity solution in place yet.

The instamine issue with Drk makes great fud food, but I expect isn't a real issue at this point. Folks have done blockchain analysis and the early coins have been mostly redistributed by now. Not saying there aren't giant whales still, just that whether the coin had that instamine issue or not, it may not have mattered.

Again, if I was you, I wouldn't choose any anonymous coin right now for what you want to do with your online store. Wait a month or two, see how RC5 does... see if a cryptonote coin fixes their issues... or Boolberry gets more attention (terrible, terrible name).

[Lauda]

Proof of stake.

Problem with Cloak is, their anonymity solution isn't what they claimed it would be. It's supposed to be trustless, yet isn't. Their audit failed, and now the devs are scrambling to start over all over again. I think they are on v3 or something with PoSA.... or in other words, there is no way you should consider that coin currently. Not only is it not at a stable price (it got dumped to smithereens), they don't even have a trustless anonymity solution in place yet.

The instamine issue with Drk makes great fud food, but I expect isn't a real issue at this point. Folks have done blockchain analysis and the early coins have been mostly redistributed by now. Not saying there aren't giant whales still, just that whether the coin had that instamine issue or not, it may not have mattered.

Again, if I was you, I wouldn't choose any anonymous coin right now. Wait a month or two, see how RC5 does... see if a cryptonote coin fixes their issues... or Boolberry gets more attention (terrible, terrible name).

I'm going to say that OP should stay away from Cloak.
XMR and DRK are the way to go. Both have proven anonymity. The 'instamine' related to DRK should not be an issue. Even if DRK succeeds trolls will call upon it again in the future.
As far as DRK goes one should wait for Kristov A. to finish his audit and the coin goes open source (if anyone has his doubts).
I think that RC5 comes in 2-3 months at most.
Dark ToR is also a very interesting concept, you should read about it.

[Joshuar]

I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

DarkCoin was the first X11 algo coin and also the first anonymous coin featuring Coin Join technology. That's why it got momentum.

Then Bytecoin BCN surfaced, with a completely different 'Cryptonote' anonymous technology. Superior than Coin Join indeed (featuring ring signatures), but there were talks about 80% of the coin having been mined during 2 years of development before the coin surfaced to general public. So everyone thought the BCN was a missed opportunity. So someone cloned it and called it XMR Monero. Everyone jumped on the XMR wagon in the name of 'fair distribution' BS.

Now you decide what is right. DarkCoin and Bytecoin are 'original', Monero is a clone of Bytecoin. There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

If you're not sure, divide your investment among DRK, BCN & CLOAK

I sincerely hope no one listens to this guy..Bytecoin has a 80% premine, and was kept in secret for 2 years, anyone who actually buys bytecoin has got to be the dumbest person on the planet.

Monero is the first ever cryptonote coin with a fair distribution and release.

Besides darkcoin and monero, I consider all the other anonymous coins worthless.

[poornamelessme]

I'm going to say that OP should stay away from Cloak.
XMR and DRK are the way to go. Both have proven anonymity. The 'instamine' related to DRK should not be an issue. Even if DRK succeeds trolls will call upon it again in the future.
As far as DRK goes one should wait for Kristov A. to finish his audit and the coin goes open source (if anyone has his doubts).
I think that RC5 comes in 2-3 months at most.
Dark ToR is also a very interesting concept, you should read about it.

Dark ToR is interesting and if they pull it off, could save Drk from just being 'one of the crowd' of other anonymous coins.

As a disclaimer, since I stated from the start that people would simply state coins they hold are the best, I still hold some Drk ... I held some Cloak but sold it before the audit came out (saw giant red flags with that coin from the start)... and hold no cryptonote coins.

The thing I dislike about Drk however are the price fluctuations... or another way to say it is what appears to be price manipulation. After several months of calm at the beginning, it basically went to full blown whale/manipulation territory, with pumps, flash dumps, pumps again... repeat as necessary... etc. All the release candidates made great checkpoints for pumps/dumps. After RC5, hopefully things stabilize a bit. Until that Dark ToR stuff comes, anyway.

From a purely technical standpoint, ring signatures may be a stronger form of anonymity. Just, they come at a price. I also am not sure why Monero gets all the attention it does, when Boolberry has a gui wallet + pruned their blockchain issues a bit -- yet it's only valued at a small percentage of what Monero goes for. I half expect a new cryptonote coin to waltz in one day, with an all-singing/dancing gui wallet, fixed bloat issues, and beat both of them.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

[poornamelessme]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Is there more to zerocash than a technical paper at this point? Due to the timeframe they used with that whole zerocoin thing, we may be looking at like 2016+ at the rate they seem to go.

The biggest competitor anonymity-wise may be DarkWallet, assuming they get decentralized anonymity going there. And if so, they basically wipe out the advantage any anonymous alt has over btc. That's probably why Drk has swung to the DarkTor talk after they finish up the release candidates.

[Lauda]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Is there more to zerocash than a technical paper at this point? Due to the timeframe they used with that whole zerocoin thing, we may be looking at like 2016+ at the rate they seem to go.

The biggest competitor anonymity-wise may be DarkWallet, assuming they get decentralized anonymity going there. And if so, they basically wipe out the advantage any anonymous alt has over btc. That's probably why Drk has swung to the DarkTor talk after they finish up the release candidates.

I believe it is just a white paper at this point, but some development work has been done on Zerocoin, so some of the code may be usable in Zerocash. Honestly, they have been really slow with ZeroCoin (abandoned) and Zerocash, so it may take a long time to come into existence.

I do not think that DarkWallet would be nearly as anonymous as Zerocash, as Zerocash uses much more complicated cryptography to mask who sends what where & the amount that people send and receive.

Isn't DarkWallet a coin join implementation? If that is correct then I think my assertation that Zerocash will be more anonymous than that is correct.