Privacy Coins

This week's lesson is about Privacy Coins, in essence coins whose transactions are secured and as an individual holder I can be assured that any transaction made on this coin's blockchain will not be in the public realm, in fact it will just be between me and the account I am transacting with. There are, as is foreseeable, a lot of pros and cons to Privacy Coins, but we will delve on that later, as we try to work out the required tasks for this homework from Professor @levycore.

1. Choose a Privacy Coin and perform a fundamental analysis of the coin in detail.

For this homework I have chosen Dash Coin, which has been around for quite a while, has shown good results and has a very good market value.

Dash is a Peer to Peer payment platform and a cryptocuurency that resides on a blockchain where all transactions are stored as a ledger. The currency was created in January 2014, and first was known as XCoin and Darkcoin. It was presented first of all as a cryptocurrency where the anonimity of its users and their transactions was secured. It had very good acceptance from the start and is nowadays very well known and one of the higher market cap cryptos.

According to Coinmarketcap, Dash has a market cap of about $1,933,000,000.00, a total supply of 18,900,000 coins and the total supply currently available is 10,162,239 coins, and its current price is at $190.00 per coin, and is #52 in market cap this data can be seen in this screen shot:

So we can see that its numbers are good, very good in fact, so we can, based on this agree that Dash provides users with what it proposed to do. But is this so? Let's see, Dash has very fast transaction, speeds, it is very scalable, but what about Dash as a security coin? Well it works as was expected there also, its transactions are very secure, and most of all anonymous, which is what a person who is looking into privacy coins wants. So I guess picking Dash as my subject for this homework was very easy and obvious.

2. Describe the steps in creating a wallet for the Privacy Coin of your choice. (Screenshot required)

To create our Dash wallet we have to got to https://www.dash.org/downloads/, and pick the wallet we want to download, if for Mac, Windows, or maybe a mobile:

Here we have downloaded the installer and must now open it:

Once we open the installer a pop up is shown, and we click next:

Again, next:

Click install:

Already set up, click next:

And now click Finish:

Welcome Page, click OK:

Configure the appearance of your wallet: (I will go with the default)

Dash Wallet is now set up and synchronising (sorry, the process is in Spanish, my Windows 10 has Spanish as default and I haven't been able to change it), in any case the wallet is now on my computer.

3. Explain the reason you chose the Privacy Coin. (State the advantages and disadvantages)

Why do I choose a privacy coin? Well mostly because I want my transactions to be secure and not open to the public, and also I want a network that is trustworthy and fast and I believe that Dash as a privacy coin fulfills all that I want.
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Advantages:

Offers a safe and anonymous way to make financial transactions over the internet.

Transactions are very fast and dependable

I feel comfortable knowing that my transactions are secure from prying eyes

As practically all crypto coins, Dash works on a blockchain, so I know I can access a complete history of my transactions at any time, and this will always be there (As long as there is an internet)

Disadvantages

Can be used by criminals to keep their illegal financial transactions unseen, but let's be clear here, I think criminals will find a way of being as anonymous as possible whatever the means they use for their transactions, be it crypto, blockchain, fiat, gold or whatever they are using.

Can be used to avoid paying taxes. Again I feel most people who don't want to pay taxes will look and find ways to avoid them.

This is a big one, governments are looking for ways to ban privacy coins, if they succeed in implementing laws doing this, privacy coins might be dealt a death blow.

4. Conclusion.

Privacy coins where created with the idea of offering a safe and anonymous way for users to perform their financial transactions over a safe platform provided by a blockchain. These coins do live up to their hopes and provide most of what people want in respect to safety and anonymity.

The major drawback I see to these coins is the fact that governments all over the world don't like them (well they don't like anything that might have an impact over thier hold on finances) and are every day mulling ways of banning or destroying crypto especially privacy coins and their ability to keep transactions from prying eyes.

I think this was quite a good lesson, and I have found out a lot about Privacy Coins, and I do wish that their future, while still not secure, will be good and they will be available to and used by everyone who has a need for them.

Tagging:
@levycore