If you start your life in point A, and you want to get to point B where B is higher than A, then it’s not enough that you are willing to struggle and work hard, you also need privacy to get there. Without privacy you will be stuck in A no matter how hard you work. I hope this helps you understand how important privacy is to improving your life, and why you cannot afford to trust anyone when it comes to privacy.

Now here is a quick bird’s eye view of the privacy coin landscape today to get you started. Take nothing at face value, verify everything yourself or feel free to drop a comment for questions, will be happy to answer. Also check my other articles for more in depth content on each aspect. There are 3 main options/models today tech wise when it comes to privacy coins:

1. Monero RingCT: the issue: weak privacy, extremely easy to filter out decoys from real spends. The good: proofs verified by your node, low inflation risk

2. Monero FCMP (planned): the issue: optional privacy, weak due to full view keys introduced with CARROT that can be aggregated to monitor flows in & out of respective wallets. Or they can be flat out leaked through non reproducible wallet implementation backdoors and become a master key that completely deanonymizes the network. Security: high inflation risk because you don’t verify transaction proofs at your node, it uses a zero knowledge proof circuit (“FCMP++”) and you only verify what the circuit says about the transaction.

3. Zcash: the issue: optional privacy. Mitigation possible by controlling the timing and amounts of the unshielding process. Full view keys of shielded pool wallets could be leaked through non reproducible binaries. Security: high inflation risk because again you cannot verify transaction proofs directly with your node, it uses a zero knowledge proof circuit (“SNARKs”) and your node only verified what the SNARK says.

4. Dero: the issue: Captain minted 2M coins for himself in the first year of deployment (2022) when binaries were not reproducible. That’s 9% of the supply (9/23). The good: strongest privacy by default, no view keys (nothing to leak), low inflation risk because it uses homomorphic encryption, all transactions are verified directly by your node homomorphically xyou don’t trust a binary circuit.

Now pick your poison.

I’d mention other low caps but the real choice is between Xmr, Zec and Dero because other privacy coins follow either the Xmr model or the Zec model. For example Salvium is a Monero fork that already uses CARROT for “compliance”. ARRR uses Zec’s SNARKs but is run by a team that just copies Zec’s updates without even understanding the inherent inflation risk. If Arrr is/was ever exploited there will be no way to know, no red flags. 

Grin is similar to Monero but without rings and stealth addresses, it uses UTXO with Pedersen Commitments but since it has no rings no nullifiers are needed because there is no sender privacy (no decoys). Beam similar to Grin, no sender privacy so again very easy to build the transaction graph.

Dero introduces a new standard by using a different primitive (El Gamal) and no utxo model (the only one to do so) which is the strongest option tech wise because it makes it impossible to build a transaction graph. 

Xelis stands to Dero like Grin to Monero, it uses Ristretto ElGamal which means no sender/receiver privacy because it’s not public key rerandomizable so it’s not possible to have decoys. You can tell the exact sender and receiver of each transaction just by looking it up in an explorer. But since it uses HE also in Xelis it’s not possible, or at least much harder compared to Cryptonote coins, to build a transaction graph. Still it’s more transparent than Dero since you can study the full transaction history of each account and look for behavioral patterns. Ie: if you use Xelis an outsider will know exactly which other accounts/exchanges you sent money to and received money from even though they don’t see amounts. 

Dero is the only coin with privacy by default, and the most advanced implementation of El Gamal, where you can’t build a transaction graph while being able to verify all TX proofs w/ your node directly.

But can you live with the fact that the Captains behind it minted 2.2M coins for themselves after spending the first pre-mine in the 2021 bull? That’s the question. That’s pure pathological greed on Captain’s side. Or, more realistically, “Captains” since Captain is probably a fictitious identity used by devs that contribute to Dero under other pseudonymns to this day. 

OTOH they released the best privacy tech to date by far. Maybe 2.2M is acceptable considering they can’t ask for VC funding, have to lay low/stay anonymous and fund themselves somehow? I don’t know.

What I know is that if I’m looking for privacy from an utilitarian point of view, nothing else comes remotely close to Dero tech wise.