Is the privacy feature useful? A quick overview of the usage of privacy coins and coin mixing services

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies help people regain control of their funds, and people no longer need to trust third parties. At the same time, privacy advocates are beginning to penetrate the industry. Bitcoin's ledger is publicly visible, and privacy coins and privacy protocols are very popular means to ensure the security of sensitive financial information of value holders.

Due to the nature of privacy, this is a somewhat tricky topic. The purpose of this article is to study well-known "privacy coins" such as Monero and Zcash, and obfuscation protocols such as mixers. How popular.

Privacy coins and obfuscation services

For cryptocurrency users to achieve maximum privacy, there are several popular methods, including the use of privacy coins and fuzzy transaction data through coin mixing or coinjoin services.This makes it difficult for on-chain analysis institutions to identify the sender and receiver of transactions Fang. There are also some private trading markets and trading platforms that can implement point-to-point transactions.

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Popular privacy coins often add elements to their code base to enable them to be obfuscated. Wasabi Wallet, Samurai Wallet, Cash Shuffle, and the new Cash Fusion, such as coin, collocation and coinjoin services and products, can help some users of "traditional" cryptocurrencies such as BTC and BCH to obtain additional levels of security and privacy.

Therefore, it is clear that collecting statistics for these currencies and protocols can be tricky, but there are still some indicators that can be used to analyze how popular these coins and services are in the market today.

The most popular privacy coins-XMR, DASH, and ZEC

messari.io's database shows statistics for one of the most popular privacy coins, Monero (XMR), which was born in 2014 in the form of a bytecoin fork. Calculated by market value, Monroe is the leader in privacy coins, with a market value of more than $ 1.4 billion as of press time.

According to Messari's data, in the past 24 hours, there were 6,772 XMR transactions, while the "actual transaction volume" during the same period was $ 20.85 million. However, due to the obfuscation operation built into the code, we cannot see the number of Monero active addresses. In contrast, an open network like Bitcoin has 865,396 active addresses, and of course the transaction volume is much higher. Nevertheless, the daily trading volume does help determine the scope of XMR use.

Another type of privacy coin that was born in 2014 is DASH, which crosses the line between privacy coins and "mainstream" cryptocurrencies, thanks to its privacy terminal function. According to Messari's data, DASH completed 21,696 transactions in 24 hours, while XMR's transactions were 6,772. However, these transactions do not all have privacy features, so it is difficult to compare.

As far as Zcash is concerned, in the past 24 hours, there were 12,703 active addresses and 3329 transactions, about half of XMR. However, ZEC's 24-hour trading volume is worth noting. Messari listed the raw transaction volume at $ 336 million and the adjusted trading volume at $ 16.98 million. Zcash is another privacy coin with a huge market capitalization, with a market capitalization of more than $ 600 million.

Proponents of privacy coins such as Monero will often say that it is difficult to confirm whether these currencies have been used. However, although Bitcoin still seems to be leading in dark web trading, XMR is still an important currency and its popularity is quite high compared to other currencies. Last night, Darkmare released financial data after being hacked, listing various cryptocurrency balances on the site:

(Yellow is the number of currencies sold, blue is the number of holdings)

The most popular coin services and wallets

Wasabi Wallet claims to be an open source, unmanaged, privacy-focused Bitcoin desktop wallet, which can achieve detrusted mixed currency and mathematically provable anonymity-Chaumian CoinJoin. As of December 28, 2019, this wallet has been downloaded more than 117,000 times.

The Android version of the Samourai mobile wallet is also very popular in the privacy circle. It uses a slightly different coinjoin system called Whirlpool, but its user base is smaller than Wasabi, which may be because it is a mobile Application, currently unavailable on iOS.

Cashshuffle is a popular BCH mixed currency protocol. Since March 27, 2019, users have mixed 209360 BCH. Its developers have also created a protocol called Cashfusion, which aims to bring the privacy level of BCH transactions close to currencies such as Monroe.

Privacy is the backbone of cryptocurrencies

As cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are gradually becoming mainstream, the efforts of regulators and centralized exchanges on KYC have led to further exploration of privacy. Although there is a lot of uncertainty in the related data and user base, market demand and computing power fluctuations, cryptocurrency users can realize through the efforts of privacy coins and privacy services that Satoshi Nakamoto does not rely on the vision of third parties It is real.

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