Privacy Coins: Monero, Dash, & Verge

Privacy coins have been around for nearly as long as Bitcoin.

Censorship resistance has been one of the most desirable features of cryptocurrencies. As the uncertainty of future cryptocurrency regulation heightens, many are motivated to move toward privacy coins. Currently, some of the most popular privacy coins are Monero, Verge, Dash, Zcash, & PIVX. Overall, Monero is one of the oldest privacy coins, and has consistently been the most reliable. Currently, Monero has some of the fastest transaction speeds and is one of the most decentralized privacy coins.

Monero’s primary value is its anonymity. Monero achieves anonymity through stealth addresses and ring confidential transactions. Ring signatures are the key distinction between Monero and other privacy coins. The ring signatures (RingCT) conceal the transaction details from the public blockchain. Only the sender and recipient can observe how much currency was sent. All Monero transactions are private by default. This is beneficial because the majority of privacy coins have a private and a public option. Often times private transaction fees are more expensive than default transaction fees.

Another comparable privacy coin is Dash. This coin is not private by default, however, there is an option to enable private transactions which would give the user complete anonymity. Dash is semi-centralized and runs on master nodes which can handle quick block sizes and large ledgers.

Verge is another privacy coin with interesting developing features. Verge uses the Tor system and I2P to service anonymity. Tor blocks the display of IP addresses which enables anonymous communication within the network. Unfortunately, Verge has an increasingly small wealth distribution. Even though Verge is a privacy coin it still displays the top 100 most-valuable wallets online. 95% of all Verge is held by only 100 addresses. Here anyone could view the transactions of Verge’s main players. In this situation, there would be no names connected with the accounts, but there could potentially be a trail.

In relation to privacy, Monero’s system would never offer something like this. Monero has an advantage over Verge and most privacy coins because it is fundamentally based on private transactions. With Monero, a user can see blocks being processed on the ledger but cannot see the wallets attached to a particular transaction.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Please do your research independently and make objective decisions. This article is intended to educate readers about privacy coins. The author does not hold positions in any of the crypto assets discussed in this article.