The Real Case About Privacy Coins vs Cryptos with Traceable Public Ledgers

First, I've been busy these past weeks with a lot of things. I have several tech projects and investments that I have to take care of, reason why I am unable to post anything. I also just made a Monero public node after buying several servers in Europe to serve the Monero community. This is not investment advice BTW and just me expressing my opinion about what I think is invalid fear surrounding the crypto community about privacy coins.

So, many are scared of privacy coins being banned due to their untraceable nature and use for bad actors. We've heard a lot in the news recently about the use of Monero in ransomware and cryptojacking.

Now, let me tell you something, Monero has been attractive to bad actors only because of its default privacy features, you don't have to do anything to mask how much you have, where you send money to or where you receive money from even if your wallet address is public and you can use one time addresses as well to collect payments without associating the receiving end to you. That's the advantage of Monero. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, your identity is not associated to your address, only if you stay away from lookin like you own the wallet, but anyone can track how much goes to, goes out of the wallet address, where it gets sent to, where a wallet's current balance came from and possibly associate it with you if, let's say, you send Bitcoin to a traceable seller of a product you asked to be delivered to your door, etc.

I talked to an old friend who designs hacking software in the darknet about this issue with Monero being a preferred currency to cybercriminals, therefore more susceptible to banning by regulators and he isn't really worried. He told me that they have no problems using Bitcoin if they had to, that it is more liquid than any privacy coin out there, the preference for Monero only really comes from the ease of hiding their identities compared to Bitcoin where they have to take extra steps and be on the look out to prevent mistakes as they take the crypto to liquidation when they need it. My conclusion here is that Monero is preferred but regulators may as well ban Bitcoin when that happens.

Update: Monero introduced atomic swaps not too long ago. Monero and Bitcoin holders can now exchange their cryptos for the other, securely, without any third party.

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