XMR should not be seen without also taking a look at DASH and ZEC (Zcash). What they have in common is that their only function is payments and they are considered to be private. The projects have different strategies however. DASH is highly focussed on main stream adoption and easy convertability into fiat, making it easy to use. The cost of this is the privacy. In that respect Monero is probably the best choice. The most rigid choice. ZCash raises questions about being centralized or not and privacy is not default.
All three coins are top 20 (November 30th 2018 resp. 11, 14, 19). Talking about privacy as a feature, PIVX enjoyed popularity but seems to be fading out, ranking 87 (same timestamp). Another coin popular for privacy is Zcoin, but failing to be in the top 100. VERGE (XVG) still seems populair, ranking 47 (same timestamp), It is endorsed (if you can put it like that) by John MacAfee, who according to many is the biggest influencer in crypto space. Make up your own mind.
There are more privacy based coins around. The market however seems to believe that only XMR, ZEC and DASH will remain significant and someday a winner is there.
That brings us to investing. If you just trade privacy coins on an exchange and do not use them, you have another perspective than a person looking for a reliable private coin.
What is the reason to wanting to have a private coin? That leads into fundamental discussions, the same that we have about the dark web, onion and so on. The first thing governments trow at you is crime suspicion. That is nonsense in most cases and the only reason governments do this is that they dislike everything they cannot control. In the 21st century any form and/or expression of liberty is a terrorist act... Many people want their privacy for other reasons. Some don't want their partners to know or do not want to be stalked - or you name it.
criminals prefer suitcases full of fiat dollarsTo "cheat" government (the people taxing you) with private coins is not very smart. You always leave traces once you are online and if your device falls into wrong hands there is hardly any limit to know what you have been doing. We would be surprised if there is no record of anybody that downloaded TOR browser or visited the Monero website. Don't be that stupid to try to hide money in private coins. We like to believe the crypto space is much less criminal and less attractive to criminals than the main stream fiat world. The biggest "crimes" probably are market fixing on some exchanges and the pump and dump schemes going on.
Again - if you are just looking for trading - we have no real favorite. Like with stable coins, the private coins do not have clear market leaders and there is no telling how the charts will look same time next year. Till then, just keep moving...because it moves.
[currencyticker currency="xmr"][currencyticker currency="zec"][currencyticker currency="dash"]
<br /><center><hr/><em>Posted from my blog with <a href='https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/'>SteemPress</a> : https://cryptmove.com/blog/2018/11/30/one-per-day-series-3-today-monero-xmr-zcash-zec-and-dash/ </em><hr/></center>