As Facebook Struggles for Blockchain Support, a Decentralized Challenger Emerges

Do all these new digital currency schemes have the two important properties that inflation is prevented and that transfers are anonymous?

The first is realized by ensuring that the calculation for minting a coin requires the expenditure of some increasing threshold amount of energy to compute the next coin. It's just like the fact that producing a kilo of aluminum requires some ampere-hours of current through an electrolytic cell, except that the next kilo requires more.

The second is realized by the transfer protocol and the distributed ledger of blockchain.