As new privacy coins take over, where will Monero, Dash, and Zcash go?

The more famous digital currencies in the industry include Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), etc. These digital currencies that have adopted certain privacy protection have achieved very high circulation market value based on their huge market demand, ranking 20th in the world, indicating that privacy protection is a very strong demand for the blockchain industry.

The economic activities of organizations in the real world show that lack of privacy is the main obstacle to the widespread adoption of decentralized smart contracts. For example, in corporate supply chain management, financial transactions, blind auctions, social or online shopping behaviors, there are many processes that users believe need to be kept confidential. From 2018 to 2019, privacy coins should be booming, occupying the attention of many new and old coin circles. The continued popularity of privacy coins is inevitable in the ever-changing crypto market. Whether it is based on darknet transactions or for the purpose of protecting privacy, BTC is highly sought after because of its certain degree of anonymity.

However, as cryptocurrencies have become more prominent in the circulation field, countries have tightened their supervision of this market, with BTC being the first to bear the brunt. However, BTC's own anonymity function is not perfect, and in order to make up for its shortcomings, people have gradually shifted their attention to privacy coins with more complete technology.

However, while privacy coins are dominated by old ones, there are many new ones. How should investors choose?

1. Monero (XMR)

Monero has already made its mark in the cryptocurrency world in 2014, providing the highest level of anonymity, making it a well-deserved veteran privacy coin.

Today, Monero is widely accepted in darknet transactions and is widely recognized as the next favorite to replace BTC. The main reason why Monero has gained such a high status among privacy coins is its ring signature technology.

What is ring signature technology?

That is, all participants will sign in a ring, so as to avoid judging who is the first person to sign from the order of signatures; when Monero uses this concept, it does not need to obtain the consent of others at all, and can use their public keys to form transaction information into a ring signature, thereby achieving complete anonymity.

2. Dash (DASH)

Dash is the most popular privacy coin among all the privacy coins, and it is also the most accepted by merchants. The currency mixing technology it uses is not difficult to understand.

Obviously, coin mixing is a way of confusing people. When it is used, it means that a transaction contains a large number of outputs and inputs, severing the corresponding relationship between them. The more people participate, the more rounds there are, the more complicated the relationship is, and the higher the confidentiality is.

This is the technical flaw. Although more people participate, the security is improved, the speed cannot be guaranteed. If there are too few participants in the early stage, the transaction records may be tracked.

3. Zcash

Zcash can be said to be the most advanced and complete anonymity technology among all privacy coins. It has been highly sought after by the cryptocurrency community since its launch, and its nominal market value even exceeds that of BTC. Such a high reputation is entirely due to its core technology - zero-knowledge proof.

For example: A needs to prove to B that he holds the key to a room. B confirms that there is something in the room. A opens the door and takes out the thing and gives it to B, thus proving to B that he has the key to the room.

In this process, B has never seen A's key and A has not provided any other valid information, but ultimately proved his ownership. Zcash, which uses this technology, can also better ensure the anonymity of transactions.

In order to meet regulatory requirements, Zcash provides users with completely anonymous transactions and non-anonymous transactions. However, in actual use, its anonymity function has not been widely used due to problems such as slow speed.

The above are the three old giants in the privacy coin circle. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages. In the process of their continuous competition, a group of new privacy coins have recently emerged and are grabbing people's attention with extraordinary momentum.

1. SERO (Overage Protocol)

The SERO system is the world's first blockchain-based platform that implements privacy protection based on zero-knowledge proof technology and can support the operation of Turing-complete smart contracts.

The SERO team uses non-interactive zero-knowledge proof Super-zk (Super-zk is developed based on the mainstream NIZK technology). Super-zk technology allows fully encrypted transactions to verify their validity, and the addresses of all parties to the transaction and related transaction data are kept confidential during the process. Compared with other anonymous means, such as various mixers or ring signature technology, Super-zk has outstanding advantages. Its biggest feature is that its anonymization algorithm has extremely high security and is not affected by the environment.

2. Dero

Derocoin was developed from Monero, so the core technology it uses is the ring signature technology, but it uses the Go language to rewrite the ring signature code and adds new innovations based on Monero.

These include anonymous smart contracts and Bulletproofs, which can ensure the anonymity and security of the entire transfer and greatly reduce transaction fees.

3. PGO (Pangolin Coin)

Pangolin Coin is a cryptocurrency project founded by a French geek. It has a community similar to Dogecoin, and with a deflationary economic model, it has attracted the attention of most people in a short period of time. Currently, PGO uses a unique CryptoNote technology to force privacy processing for all operations, truly achieving untraceability and unanalysis, with extremely high security and privacy. Fast transactions, privacy and ease of use make this coin very suitable for paying or tipping anyone at any time. PGO will provide online and offline merchants with full-featured and stable modules, applications and devices to support use in daily payments. The team is also currently trying the blockchain + charity route.

4. Grin & Beam

Grin and Beam are both privacy coins developed based on the MimbleWimble protocol.

The origin of the MimbleWimble protocol is closely related to Bitcoin. Its original intention was actually to help Bitcoin save storage space and improve the anonymity and security of transactions. The principle of achieving anonymity is to make the transaction address non-existent in the transaction, and the intermediate state of the transaction can also be merged, which can ensure the anonymity of the transaction from the source while ensuring security and reliability.

However, during the development process, it was discovered that it had a major conflict with the Bitcoin script, so it was ultimately not used in Bitcoin. Instead, with the efforts of two anonymous masters, two independent cryptocurrency projects, Grin and Beam, were created one after another.

The above are the newcomers that have emerged in the privacy coin circle in the past two years. Although they have been online for a short time, they have quickly occupied the privacy cryptocurrency market. Basically, the computing power has achieved rapid growth in a short period of time, which shows the fierce competition.

Whether they are old-fashioned currencies or new privacy coins, they each have irreplaceable advantages. Among them, Monero (XRM), DASH, and ZCASH are increasingly used for actual payments and are relatively practical. The practicality of Dero, PGO, Grin&Beam remains to be verified, but they are all making new attempts and breakthroughs in technology.