Quote from: dinofelis on March 19, 2017, 05:35:03 PM

Quote from: kalliper on March 19, 2017, 09:22:13 AM

I've seen a lot of shilling on this forum, and I can't tell where it ends.
Can someone tell me the positives and negatives of Dash, Monero and Zcash?
Is one more anonymous than the other?

DASH's anonymity depends on the masternodes not keeping logs of the mixing they provide. So most probably, DASH is good enough for some form of low level anonymity. If you are hiding from the local police, that's OK. If you are hiding from a serious agency, that's not good enough. It is of course way better than using bitcoin with a centralized mixer, because that mixer knows all of your mixing. With DASH, that is the same with masternodes, but not ALL of them belong to Evan. So you may be using some master nodes belonging to different people, and maybe they are not all logging your mixing.

Monero is quite anonymous, but not 100%. In fact, monero transactions become more opaque over time. What is good with monero is that ALL transactions are anonymous. That's not the case with DASH and ZCASH.

ZCASH is, if the crypto is right, 100% anonymous between those participants that activate the anon option. If ZCASH would have been compulsory anon, that would have been good. But it isn't.

The trusted setup is not supposed to harm anonymity, but just overall number of coins. If the trusted setup is not to be trusted, those keeping the secret keys can print as many coins as they want. But they cannot deanonimise the chain.

Monero and ZCASH both use advanced cryptography for anonymity. DASH only uses mixers on a transparent chain. In principle, ZCASH anon is perfect, but this is screwed with the fact that anon is optional. So people "see you go anon". Monero is good but not perfect, but nobody "sees you go anon" because everybody is.

I think that this is a pretty fair analysis of Monero/Dash/Zcash. I'm glad you touched on the Zcash initial setup not effecting anonymity, even if done improperly. I was about to chime in with that, as some of the posts up thread are misleading in those regards.

If the trusted setup was done maliciously, then they could print an unlimited amount of coins undetectably, but it would not effect anonymity of Zcash transactions. The former is still pretty bad, but they were pretty transparent with the trust ceremony and I don't believe the setup was done malicously.