Private coins are cryptocurrencies which empowers anonymous and unidentified blockchain transactions by concealing their source. Private coins deals with aspects such as untraceability and anonymity. Untraceability makes it plainly impossible for third-party to track trails of any transaction that took place virtually. Whereby, anonymity helps hide user’s identity (including name, address etc.). In simple words, the private coins are cryptic coins which can be owned by any individual, in any amount and sent anytime and anywhere without even anyone noticing. To evade chain analysis of private coins, the unsigned cryptocurrencies use techniques such as mixing numerous transactions of different account holders and hiding user’s address and wallet balance.
Top Three Private Coins
According to the estimate, more or less 63 private coins are available in the cryptocurrency market for the purpose of trading. Observers assume that the total worth of these projects is said to be a whopping $2 billion. Although, all the private coins are thriving to offer the best possible approach towards privacy and cryptocurrency. Yet, there are only a few which made it to the top three.
Following are the three dominate private coins currently;
XMR
Monero (XMR) is a famous private coin and cryptocurrency which was first released in the year 2014. The decentralized cryptocurrency uses public’s distributed ledger with various privacy enhancing technologies so as to keep user’s data protected. XMR uses zero-knowledge proofs, ring signatures, IP address obscuring as well as stealth addresses methods to hide users’ information. It is important to mention that people are using
Monero for illegal activities like cryptojacking, money laundering, ransomware and darknet markets. Criminals across the globe are taking advantage of XMR tokens, due to its trusted privacy. This private coin literally makes transactions unlinkable and undetectable.
In actual fact,XMR is so protected when it comes to privacy that the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) put bounty of around $625K for the one who cracks the anonymity technology of Monero. Moreover, if a person wants to use Monero GUI wallet, the user must present three piece of detailed information.
Monero (XMR) has currently a worth of $1.13 billion making it a liege in the category by market capitalization. With the key feature of privacy and massive market cap, XMR has proven to be the most powerful and popular private coin in the entire world.
DASH
Another controversial yet prominent private coin is DASH because it offers users the opportunity to receive and send value in disguise. The pioneering private coin has been in operation since the year 2014. DASH coin is also known as XCoin and DarkCoin. In order to mask the transactions observed by users, DASH uses elective anonymity like PrivateSend under CoinJoin strategy. Dash Core Group is responsible to maintain the cryptocurrency development. DCG explains that DASH coin focuses on two main aspects including user protection and usability. DASH is often considered Bitcoin’s fork which means that DASH coin is not a natively anonymous coin and thus it is not an anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrency. Proof of Stake mechanism is applied by DASH during transactions to give an extra layer of protection. Near instant transactions are also providing convenience to users through features such as InstantSend. All the aforementioned features helps in providing users with low cost of transaction and impressively high transaction speed.
So, it can be assumed that DASH is the second most powerful and notable private coin due to its ease-of-use feature.
ZCASH
ZCASH coin is another premium private coin which shares the league of fork Bitcoin. DASH was launched in the year 2016 by Electric Coin Company. In order to confirm anonymous transactions, DASH uses energy-intensive PoW mechanism. The shielded transactions takes place through privacy and untraceability mechanisms. In addition, transactions are verified by using Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS) under ZCASH network. ZCASH is promoting optional privacy for transaction with flexibility. Users have the power to decide whether they want to keep transactions public or private. Through cryptographic tools such as Zero-Knowledge Proof, ZCASH is able to hide the addresses of value senders and receivers efficiently.
Privacy Coins Matter
E-commerce tycoons such as Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook etc. have been pushing the limit to public’s privacy and thus old-school cryptocurrencies and private coins such as Monero, DASH and ZCASH have step up to boost individual power and privacy.
References
https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-are-privacy-coins
https://medium.com/shapeshift-stories/what-are-privacy-coins-6df8622ebf76
https://www.cnbctv18.com/cryptocurrency/explained-what-are-private-cryptocurrencies-how-they-are-different-from-public-ones-11574832.htm
