Reviving discussion on cryptocurrencies addition

[lrq3000]

In the past before the fork, there was a discussion about whether cryptocurrencies should be added as a new page on the guide.

The main argument in favor was that cryptocurrencies are a medium of monetary freedom, allowing for a decentralized proof of ownership (of value or of items).

The main argument against was that the technology has yet to mature and it's hard to know the effective security and privacy of the various so-called "privacy coins".

There are some news on this front:

• Last year, the american IRS put a bounty of $625,000 to break Monero's transactions anonymity. This signals that they did not have the tools to break it before, and are desperate to get ones. In the end, they paid double, $1.25M to 2 companies, to get the job done under 8 months. Which seems to have led to nothing as we are way past the deadline by several months. However, another company, CipherTrace, which also got a fund from an american government agency (DHS here, not IRS), announced they developed a year ago a tool that could break Monero's anonymity. On August 4 2021, they announced they improved it so much they could break any Monero's transaction. Given the high price to get access to the tool ($16k per user and per search), there are no independent confirmation, but Monero had several severe vulnerabilities found earlier this year, so this isn't out of the question. The bottom line is that more time is needed to assess whether Monero's protocol is resilient enough to attacks to provide privacy guarantees to its users.
• Another new contender is the Secret Network. What is interesting is that this protocol does not rely on a single token like Monero relies on XMR, but rather it provides an allegedly anonymous network for any other crypto token such as Ethereum and ERC20 tokens. An interesting feature is that they could even find a way to hide the value of transactions before they get confirmed, in order to avoid front-running bots snooping other users, which shows that their network is indeed providing innovative obfuscating capabilities. In other words, this is the first blockchain network that not only obfuscates addresses identities, but also the transactions history (the distributed ledger) itself. No independent audit yet.

Conclusion: There are interesting candidates worth monitoring, but they are not mature enough yet for inclusion IMHO.

[freddy-m]

Something such as Monero or ZCash have been going long enough that it would probably be 'safe' to list them. However I wouldn't want to, really.

[lrq3000]

Why would it not be within the scope? This is just another type of transaction IMHO, just like communication and file sharing, with privacy ideals being of similar importance, no?

[Mikaela]

I would like to add environmental concerns into consideration in case this gets revisited.

[jonaharagon]

I think we can probably revisit this after recent changes. We currently semi-endorse some cryptocurrencies already, such as having Monero qualify as a private payment method for email and VPN providers.

Listing actual Cryptocurrency recommendations has the benefit of allowing us to clarify that most cryptocurrency isn't private at all. This is a common misconception in the privacy community that could potentially have real-life consequences if someone used Bitcoin (for example) improperly.

As far as I am aware, the only reputable private-by-default cryptocurrency is Monero, and from that perspective we should be promoting its use for the services we recommend that accept it.

Private banking is a difficult problem that is not really solved by existing centralized payment processors or other cryptocurrencies, so Monero (this is unique among cryptocurrencies in my opinion) has a distinct advantage over both technologies.

If Monero is our only recommendation, I don't think the environmental impact is notable enough to warrant mentioning on Privacy Guides. Monero is geared towards actual person-to-person transactions, not the type of energy-guzzling transactions that add no real value which are commonplace on other networks like Ethereum, so our recommended usage of it seems legitimate enough to outweigh that concern.

I don't think we can list Zcash (not private by default).

Some questions:

• Is there a reason to not list Monero at the moment?
• Do any existing non-crypto payment methods offer the same advantages as Monero?
• Is there a Monero alternative being overlooked?
• Has Monero been audited? Is Monero generally considered secure? Does the uncertainty (if any) around CryptoNote's security warrant mentioning?

[Mikaela]

GNU Taler?

[jonaharagon]

Taler looks interesting in a proof-of-concept sense, but I can't find any information on actual exchanges or merchants accepting it.

[dngray]

I think we're looking at that in privacyguides/privacyguides.org#1068