Its fully anonymous in a decentralised way, integrated on protocol level and is optional.
It uses a thoroughly improved and adjusted CoinJoin to accomplish that.
Well that is quite impressive. Is there any other method of doing anonymous transactions currently? (Whether its a service on top of bitcoin or another cryptocoin which implements an anonymous feature)
There are a number of other altcoins that have a strong focus on anonymity but the anonymity there is either not optional (its anonymous by nature) or they have
totally different (and therefore uncompatible with Bitcoin) blockchains like for example Cryptonote altcoins. Dash on the other hand is forked from Bitcoin and
is therefore much more easy to implement by merchants who are already using Bitcoin for their payments.
Also, why is it a seperate action in the protocol and not a standard (all transactions anonymous).
As i understand it is to maintain tracebility through blockchain explorers, used in such a way it obscures the links beween sender and receiver,
making it impossible to trace transactions back to sender (when using Darksend / PrivateSend) and users that dont want to have anonymity in their transactions
can also still use it. Basicly its about giving options to users.
That's not true Shadowcash is bitcoin based and works on a duel token system that allows you to choose between traceable or non-traceable transactions
"ShadowSends anonymous cryptographic transaction protocol uses dual-key stealth addresses, traceable ring signatures (presentation of the anonymous cryptographic transaction protocol which utilizes the above mentioned cryptographic principles). We explain how Shadow introduces a much higher level of privacy and anonymity to the network while still preserving the core principles of trustless decentralization, unforgeability and doublespend prevention. We also presented performance data of our scheme including proof sizes, signature generation times and verification times in our ShadowSend Whitepaper"
