They're still a decade ahead of most people. It seems only now that people are becoming aware of privacy coins. I go to a lot of crypto meetups and every time I bring up that bitcoins aren't fungible (because they carry full provenance and you might not be able to cash out tainted coins) I just get blank stares. FATF Travel Rule is turning up the heat on this.

I haven't kept up with developments though. What are best privacy coins these days. ZCash seems to be the institutional favourite while Monero hasn't moved much.

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OutOfHere an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Zcash is not a privacy coin in the same way that Litecoin isn't. In both cases, their privacy is optional, which is to say that when you need to swap it, your recipient will likely not accept the private version. Monero is a privacy coin with default privacy.

Institutional pumps and dumps are exactly the thing to steer clear of, and Monero is fortunate to not have become a huge victim of them. Monero has seen more organic growth.

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>tainted coins

All you have to do is make a single transaction using all of them. You will receive a freshly minted UTXO. Each bitcoin block involves burning a set of UTXO and then minting a new set of clean UTXO.

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wmf an hour ago | parent [-]

Nope, taint flows through transactions. If the input(s) are tainted so will be the outputs.

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent [-]

By that definition everyone in the same block is tainted. Maybe the bitcoins from your output came from someone else's input. And you tainted input may have entirely gone to the miner as their reward UTXO. You can't really trace an individual bitcoin / satoshi because in reality it's just a bunch UTXOs constantly being created and destroyed. Maybe you can distribute a percentage of the taint among all the outputs, but at that points its like most US dollars have traces of cocaine on them.

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wmf 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

That isn't how Bitcoin works at all. All the transactions in a block are not CoinJoined together.

	▲	charcircuit 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe this example will help. Let's say a user has 1 bitcoin UTXO that is tainted and then 1 bitcoin UTXO that is not tainted. They create a transaction that takes both UTXO as an input and as an output creates 2 UTXO of 0.5 bitcoin. In this scenario, is the first output UTXO of the transaction tainted? The second? The miner's reward UTXO? Someone else's output UTXO?

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pertsix an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would Bitcoin purists care about off ramping onto fiat?

This seems awkwardly unnecessary for a technology that has only prioritized deflationary economics and economic sovereignty through private key encryption.

	▲	cperciva 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Serious answer: Because they have to eat. Being a purist doesn't mean they can afford to ignore the world they live in; even if they believe that USD is fundamentally worthless and keep all their wealth in Bitcoin, they still need to occasionally pay bills to people who don't take Bitcoin.
	▲	wmf an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There are virtually no actual purists. And criminals are generally more opportunistic than ideological.