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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

There are fully anonymous transactions in some of the cryptocurrencies, like in Zcash I believe. I thought such innovations would overtake and make the original bitcoin obsolete, but I've been very wrong, because bitcoin is still popular.

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I think this fact points out the disparity between people using crypto for ideological reasons and them using it for investment reasons. Most people don't care about the whitepaper, just that "stonks only go up" and buy accordingly. So small, good projects aren't as reliable an investment vehicle as a larger, more established coin that is almost guaranteed to be sellable if needed.

I’m not aware yet that any cryptocurrency has been proven fully impossible to deanonymize, especially if there’s any off ramps anywhere.

For example: https://crypto.stanford.edu/timings/paper.pdf is for zcash and monero

It’s possible that someone comes up with a robust mechanism but if you interact with any other coin (crypto or fiat) it can expose additional side channels that are impossible to close.

Zcash is flawed lie. They are not fully anonymous or anything. There were several reports how to trace them.

Can you link to one of them? All I can recall is "shielded isn't default" and "if you transact too quickly it's risky" from recent memory.

Could you elaborate on that? I wasn't able to confirm that, but I'm massively out of the loop too.

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