I appreciate it, maybe when you get more time, or maybe somebody else can offer an explanation. What advantages or disadvantages does this have over other solutions of some of the other currencies.
At present the most adopted anonymous system is CryptoNote. It suffers badly from blockchain bloat, so it is expensive in terms of storage and bandwidth. Bytecoin and monero as they presently exist will be unuseable in 3 or 4 years, especially if adoption increases. Boolberry relies on "pruning" to address this problem, but it still exists because the memory-expensive ring signatures can't be pruned until the coins have been spent. One way around this problem is to "expire" coins and then prune on expiration--but as you can imagine, do you want to wake up one day and see your nest egg disappear just to save some guy some harddrive space? StealthCoin seeks to address this problem using "sublinear" signatures, but they really only defer the problem because, for a typical ring size, it only reduces by a constant factor (about 2/3 reduction for the typical scenario). That's actually an amazing improvement, if it can be done, but it doesn't solve the problem completely.
The other solution to very strong anonymity is zerocoin/zerocash, which is still vaporware. It is promised for anoncoin, but as yet undelivered. It has a very real problem that some information required to seed the so-called Merkle tree needs to be destroyed. These systems therefore
trust a "third party" (non-participant) to seed the Merkle tree and then destroy the information completely. The problem with zerocoin/zerocash, therefore is this aspect of trust.
The third solution is stealth addresses, which actually provide very good anonymity. A stealth address hides the recipient of a transaction completely. It does not hide the sender, though, so it leaks a lot of information about the transaction. But if you are missing every other dot in a transaction chain, it becomes very hard to connect them to make a clear picture. A huge advantage that stealth address transactions have over the other systems is that they require no more storage than a bitcoin transaction. So stealth addresses are a compromise, but in reality an excellent compromise. These work perfectly in SSD.
SSD is unique in that it is the first coin that offers anonymous transactions (stealth addresses) with anonymous networking (tor). Because of that combination, I call it the "most anonymous coin". That's a qualitative assessment, but in my opinion it is a fair one.
I hope that helps. And if I didn't convince you, feel free to dump into my buy orders.
Nice summary but I think you missed XC as a relevant contender...
That said, Anon features are kind of required these days in a coin and I think at least the option needs to be there or the coin is not going to survive. The thing that is going to set coins a part are going to be brand new things that no one has done before...and that is why I jumped onto SSD a long time ago - a kick arse anon solution with a Proof of Concept on the horizon...
