Re: A good and exhaustive summary of differences between best anonymous coins ?

Hello guys, I thought it would be really nice if someone could do it here. I'm very interested in some coins I found recently (ShadowCash, Monero) that seems like to be really good competitor to Darkcoin with great concepts. They have good dev' with many annoncement and news incoming after a lot of work that has been very well made, at least that is what my researches told me.

Anyone could explain me the differences ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=745352.0 (SDC)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0 (XMR)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.0 (DRK)

Thanks for your future help guys !

Cheers Wink

There has been a little bit of a debate about this, which occasionally turns into a troll/flame/FUD fest. People are very defensive about their coins. Personally I feel that SDC has the most promise from things I have seen. However I think we should support all projects that are attempting to increase privacy and anonymity in crypto.

Anyways Isidor Zeuner is said to be coming out with a review on ShadowCash in the near future, and I heard he may also be comparing ShadowCash to Monero, DRK, cryptonote, and other anon coins to highlight the similarities and differences. There has been some confusion on this issue. I think that if ShadowCash passes peer review without any critical flaw then it is probably the best anon coin. But I'm sure others who are diehard fans of other anon coins will disagree.

Also I should mention that the Shadow Project has other valuable things such as ShadowChat encrypted messaging within the official wallet. Soon they say they will add voice, video, and file support. They are also working on a decentralized marketplace within the official wallet, similar to open bazaar. They also have had many other accomplishments with their wallet and mobile wallets.

So, encrypted messaging and basically the opinion of some broke plebian discord result in the amount of $282,482.

ring signatures and basically some crazed bible thumpers brought together $1,415,675.

while fancy mixing, with basically the entire social capital that was originally interested in an anonymous bitcoin originally bring in $16,963,366

and you're telling me that the price rising to greater than 17 million dollar market cap hinges on the opinion of one broke absolutely unrelated to cryptocurrency motherfucker?

Please.

If that worked I'd be a fucking millionaire right now.

Hello there. I never said any such thing about price resulting from one broke/bloke. Rather the price is more a function of the press and media hype that a coin gets. Unfortunately for ShadowCash it has not gotten the attention it yet deserves, as it has been eclipsed by other anon coins such as DRK, which got a first mover advantage. People also got burned out on a lot of anon coin scams, so they are very skeptical of any new coin and tired to look into them all.

Also Isidor Zeuner is not some bloke unrelated to cryptocurrency. He is a German cryptographer, and one of the few active members on the Bitcoin developers mailing list. Often his posts are involved with anonymity and privacy. You can read some of Isidor Zeuner's stuff on the bitcoin dev mailing list here: https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/

Hey I happen to totally be his cousin that knows just as much as he does.

I can tell you theres a lot of size, which will lead to overloaded p2p networks as well as hard drives unless pruning is a possibility (still inconsequential because of the massive size of the transactions overloading peoples internet connections - nodes will be permanently centralized), and also theres the lack of security against quantum computing which is the same damn reason cryptonote is seemingly shitting the bed. So, not only will there be the possibility to double spend, the entire transaction history will have a matching quantum algorithm.

Don't paint a bag of shit blue and tell me theres chocolates inside critter.

Lol, sounds credible. One interesting thing to consider is that recently Evan Duffield the lead DRK developer said that DRK's scheme also causes blockchain bloat, but it isn't as bad because only about 1 in 100 transactions use darksend, and its only used when needed (39 min mark): http://youtu.be/5zPYWEPh_Us?t=39m28s

The same could actually be said for ShadowCash. Because Shadow has two units of account, SDC, and also Shadow (SDT). When sending SDC to SDC there is no bloat at all and it works just like Bitcoin and is transparent. Only when using the Shadow send feature would it create bloat as far as I understand, and Shadow send is only used when needed for privacy.

I have heard that the issue of a quantum attack would affect all cryptos in breaking the ECDSA signatures. But this could be protected against by never reusing addresses from what I understand. Also new signing algorithms in the future could be applied to resist such quantum attacks. I have heard Vitalik Buterin suggest updating to Lamport signatures to help guard against certain attacks, not sure if this would help against quantum attacks, but I can remember reading about some other schemes that would. Here is an interesting read on the topic: http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

But the size difference is what's tough to deal with.

DRK is using a protocol known to be prunable. Will there be a larger chain - yes. But it will still be smaller than the size due to creating ring signatures - the p2p network likely isn't going to get overloaded. Both CN and the bastardized version of it that is now in use in shadowcash are presumed to be prunable, but there are no public proofs of it to date.

The real question here is whether or not fancy mixing will be susceptible to quantum algorithms - in the sense that your transaction history can be traced from the blockchain. I have yet to see anyone claim that, and I believe it would be harder because the privacy is afforded much more from statistics than cryptography in DRK, where CN and SDC offer their privacy through mostly cryptography alone. But again, I'm just the guy's cousin - so all I can really say for sure is do I want 1 in 100,000 or so (meaning: number out of my ass, could be as low as 1 in 2, or even higher than 100k - i dunno) transactions traceable due to a statistical predictability, or do I want every transaction ever recorded on the blockchain to be susceptible to tracing. I'm concentrating on this, because I'm operating under the assumption that the PoW, DS protection, and even transaction creation can move toward a quantum-secure algorithm in the future - but fact is that it's just not there yet.

So, I'm left with the really tough decision - do I go with the two methods that currently have a legitimately scary flaw in their reason for existence, one of which has very little infrastructure and one a little bit more - or do I go with the method that has a statistical error that will ultimately lead me to a few, but not all, of my transactions being traceable. It's tough - but I gotta go with the car that's working for now, however few cylinders it's running on.

The second I see quantum secure transaction creation, PoW, and DS prevention, as well as pruning (as well as 100+GB bandwidth available to a cryptocurrency) on the CN blockchain is the second I hop back into buy mode. Probably even sooner than that because cryptographic protection > statistical protection IMO, but end of the day, if I actually need to use a private currency in Feb 2015 I'm gonna gave to give it to DRK. If I actually need to use a private currency in 2016, or 2017, after some changes been changed, I'm gonna have to go with CN.