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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far?

I wonder if the Stellar network is "leakier" than a decentralized network would be, though.

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Here's the problem with cryptonote: if I play 10 hands of poker at an online casino, with money I bought on an exchange, I have very little privacy. Anyone who can coerce or compel the casino and exchange's cooperation can get my real identity simply by looking at intersections amongst potential ancestor payments. This is because in cryptonote, each payment only has e.g. 4 potential ancestors. While each of those themselves have the same property, you can still look at intersections and deduce linkages with very high probability.

>>So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far?

I wouldn't call Monero "untraceable" even though I am a very big fan of XMR. It takes work to put a lot of steps between you and the payee at more levels than simply the transactional one.

How do you mean? Why would you need to, if the payment is untraceable? Are you talking about what happens after you purchase something?

How is zcash's track record with regard to untraceability?

It's fantastic, but it takes a lot of memory to generate a private transaction (no mobile wallets for that!) and because private addresses are opt in, not many are being used in the wild

using a lot of memory is still better than monero's requirement that you synch a 30+GB blockchain

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