To Privacy or NOT to Privacy
Although I don't deny that all human actions (speech as well) have their own consequences I strongly believe that no man has any authority to cut these God-given rights. However there are always some people who think they can censor and to steal privacy from other people. And it's strange that especially this group of people strongly build their own circle of total privacy around them.
Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide
is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
-- Edward Snowden
Project Umbra and ShadowCash celebration
There are several cryptocurrency projects that believe in strong privacy (Maidsafe, Monero, Dash, VCash, ...) in communication and payments. ShadowProject is one of them. As ShadowCash blockchain reached 1,000,000 blocks today, project team also brought new Umbra client today. This will be a brief overview of it.
Major features
Umbra can be seen as ShadowCash (SDC) wallet with some additional features. There are the major ones:
Private and public balance
You can use public addresses which are staking and its visibility is to Bitcoin or you can use Stealth addresses which move your transactions into anonymous world with using Ring Signatures and other anonymity features.
Umbra marketplace
This feature is still under development and it should be available by the end of 2016. It will basically provide built-in anonymous market.
Private and group chat
So far ShadowCash client provided private chat. Now Umbra implements group chat so you can securely chat with multiple people. To avoid exposing IP addresses TOR and I2P can be applied to completely hide your presented on the network.
Client status
It is a first version of Umbra Client and not everything works as expected (specifically there are some UI glitches) . However the overall feeling is positive and ShadowProject's Umbra it's definitely promising piece of technology and it's quite obvious that its community is building it with significant passion.
I want to know more
This overview belongs to client version 1.5.0.0-dirty. If you read this article later you can have possibly newer build.
More about ShadowProject - https://shadowproject.io
More about Umbra project - https://umbra.shadowproject.io/