I found about "First Stealth Address - Privacy without mixer"
https://vertcoin.org/wp/stealth-addresses .
Now I would be interested to hear from the technicans here how secure these Stealth Address are? Is it really the "best solution" for anonymity like promoted? Many coins claimed this before (cryptonote for example) and all of them failed against darksend. what is the advantage of darksend agains stealth addresses?
Stealth addresses are cryptographically "hidden" addresses so that your wallet can receive money but the sending address remains hidden. Cryptonote uses a combination of stealth addresses (for receiving I think) and ring signatures (for sending).
To cut a long story short, all technologies "work", it boils down to the contrasting properties of public vs non-public blockchains.
The reason I invested in Dash and not Cryptonote is that Dash has a public blockchain which I think is an aspect of electronic "money" that can never be compromised if you want to maintain a high level of confidence in the system. Consider how many visits blockchain.info gets per day with people checking this that and everything - an opaque blockchain removes all that accountability from the system leaving it open to scams, heists and fearmongering rumours designed to play havoc with markets.
Nor is telling people "it's math" any good. As I stated in another post, people don't get on planes because they got shown a bunch of aerodynamic equations. They get on them because they see others getting on and not dropping out of the sky.
Bitcoin has survived an unbelievable battering over the last 5 years - from the press, from rumourmills about "malleability double spends", from exchange heists - you name it, it's suffered it. Yet through all that experience, nobody questions its technical integrity today. It has survived and the fact that it did is due in no small measure to the public blockchain supporting a level of accountability and confidence that it unmatched by any financial system be it fiat, precious metal markets or other.
Public consensus is what ultimately "defines" money and you can't have public consensus without a public blockchain. Bitcoin is already an anonymous currency - nobody has yet discovered the identities of the major thieves of the last few years by inspecting the blockchain. Dash boosts this anonymity by an order of magnitude without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and blowing "public consensus" out of the water.
For more developed posts see:
Blockchains and the "right" place to implement cryptography in cryptocurrencies if you want to create money instead of a cryptographic bookkeeping system https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/421615.msg11035761#msg11035761The value of public consensus and blockchain auditability:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1064814.msg11429953#msg11429953Finally, consider this: No monetary medium has ever coupled privacy as a property to the medium itself (for the obvious reason that it isn't 'money' anymore if you do that). Dash boosts privacy, not by hiding the money, but by improving massively on bitcoin's fungibility. Once you've done that, the Satoshi cryptocurrency model naturally takes care of privacy (by the means explained in the first of those two links).
If we do monetary "systems analysis" as if we were designing a business system, we can verify that this is the right approach because:
[1] - fungibility is a an intrinsic monetary property which is cited in countless definitions of "money"
[2] - privacy is an extrinsic monetary property (a property of something outside the monetary medium, like your floorboards where you store the gold)
In bitcoin, that 'extrinsic property' is the universal set of private keys (those are the 'floorboards', the public addresses are the bar of gold. You need to know the private key to access the public commodity).
This model works very powerfully for both criteria - confidence and privacy - when the public blockchain's fungibility is optimal. That is exactly what Dash is designed to address.
