Quote from: jk_14 on May 24, 2014, 09:00:44 PM

Quote from: AlterMiner on May 23, 2014, 06:24:18 PM

Stealth addresses will be in June.
http://www.reddit.com/r/vertcoin/comments/26alpo/does_anybody_know_when_stealth_addresses_are/chpd02n

Is this risk below related also to stealth vertcoin addresses?

"Secondly, the key feature of DRK, anonymity, is also its greatest weakness for going mainstream. You have seen how hostile governments have been to just Bitcoin, which transactions can be traced in. Now imagine DRK popping up into the mainstream, do you think governments will sit idle and let businesses accept it? Some might, others will clamp down even harder than they did with Bitcoin. Countries that are friendly to Bitcoin now might not be friendly to a coin that has money laundering built right into it. Yes, a government can't stop the protocol, but they can stop businesses from accepting it by making the use illegal. Most likely, this would not be hard to achieve as they could simply make the argument the main use of the coin is for money laundering. If they made it illegal, it won't stop it being used on the black markets, but it will stop it from ever going mainstream because everyday businesses simply aren't going to break the law to allow a new payment method. So its growth potential would probably be limited to the black market. I don't think you would ever see Amazon or any big company using it, because of the backlash and the government crackdowns.

This is something that a lot of people don't realize I think. They think "hahahah government can't stop me". No, they can't, but they can stop the coin from ever reaching a mainstream audience. Litecoin has a good rep. Its the oldest alt coin still around. Yes, the technology of DRK is far superior, but it won't really matter if the government(s) never allow it to be used to purchase everyday things. Bitcoin and Litecoin are just starting to be viewed favorably in some countries, things like DRK will not help cryptocurrency as a whole because then it gives government a reason to crackdown."
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=19819.msg173311#msg173311

We've always been of the same view - back when Zerocoin implementation was being discussed, we decided against it (and in favour of stealth addresses) precisely because of these issues, which we feel will stand in the way of mainstream adoption of any truly anonymous cryptocurrency.

Stealth addresses are different - they give some privacy, but all the transactions are still there in public sight on the blockchain - there's a record of the transactions that have taken place, and nothing becomes truly untraceable, but they do provide decent privacy akin to what you expect from the banking system - ie. everyone else can't view all your transactions and link them easily to you.

The other benefit is, all the usual blockchain tools work, and you don't lose all those nice features as a result of anonymising a lot of transactions.