Why Privacy Coins are a Must Have, Their Pros and Cons

One of the most important features of cryptocurrency is its ability to offer a user full anonymity and privacy. Is it good? A challenging question. For most people tend to believe that anonymity is something important only for fraudsters and criminals. And this is partially true. However, ordinary people also need privacy to protect their everyday life.

1. Limits on Control

Keeping your information private, and inspiring other people to do the same, lessens the risk of control, monitoring, surveillance or even manipulation from governments or other external authorities. Remember, the more you know about the person, the easier the person becomes to monitor and control. If you make a mistake and you reveal any information of yourself, company, business, organization, etc., the government will take this advantage to exploit your life.

2. It’s a Slippery Slope

Privacy is the only tool that can limit any external control, for instance, control from governments, attackers, companies and other individuals. When it is not observed, then you are giving free access to your data, and this could result into your rights being taken away from you. Keeping yourself secure all the time through reinforced privacy, doesn’t mean that you are against the government, it rather means that you are fighting for your freedom, for instance, freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of choice, and others. Laws only works in keeping the society more fully cladded but keeping your own privateness, helps to keep the society more secure.

3. Personal Information is a Commodity

Every web search on a search engine, every post on a social platform, is carrying your profile info, and this data can accumulate over time to make a detailed digital profile. No doubt, social media plus other online platforms are part of our day-to-day life, making sure that your personal information is kept private, is very fundament and is regarded as a commodity and how you handle your privacy is also very important. You should choose wisely whom and how to reveal your data in order not to be misused.

4. Freedom to Think & Speak

Every human being – young or old, woman or man – needs freedom to have a smooth-edged sense of self, in fact, the necessity for privacy is a universal cultural feature. It gives limits of protection for the people to feel free and be themselves and go ahead to sightsee areas of their mind minus any interference, fear or panic that they will be attacked or arbitrated. As already said, privacy is a very important thing in life and that is why people need to have freedom of thought to develop and foster their resourcefulness and boost their self-expression.

5. Privacy Is Not Just About You

When we talk about this notion, we don’t mean the privacy of you as an individual, we mean the whole system, network, users and the exchanges at large. When one user becomes careless about his or her security, an important information related to other users can be leaked to bad actors and use it to cause them problems such as hackings, frauds, cyberattacks and other sorts of scams.

Many people today choose to use exchanges that provide peer-to-peer (P2P) services to sell or buy cryptocurrency than any other option. P2P transactions leave user’s safety uncompromised and bad actors find it difficult to access the user’s information.

6. Your Personal and Financial Safety is at Risk

When you neglect your financial privacy, it can attract thieves to come and steal, rob or even physically attack you. It is the same thing when it comes to cryptocurrencies, those individuals or exchanges whose private keys or security details have leaked, have been hacked, damaged or infected with malware.

The list of exchanges that have been hacked is endless, some of which include: Cryptopia, HitBTC, Coinmama, Binance all in 2019; Coincheck, Pure Bit, BitGrail, Zaif, CoinSecure, MappleChange in 2018; Nicehash in 2017; Bitfinex in 2016; Bitstamp, Bter in 2015; Mt. Gox, Mintpal, Cryptsy in 2014; Silk Road in 2013, CoinBene, DragonEX, and many more. In fact, as the result of these hacks, some of the rich and wealthy people have become quite due to the huge losses they have made. So, privacy should be second to none in any productive activity.

7. Your Reputation Is On the Line

Every person on this planet has that one thing that he/she wouldn’t want the public to know or see. As a matter of fact, the majority of us if not all, have things we do in personal (either at home, at work, church, mosque, bars, beaches, etc.) that we don’t want to share or reveal to our friends or the public. All said, let us assume that everything that you have ever done in privacy is now to be revealed and exposed to the public, what do you think would happen to you? Or how would you feel?

Privacy Coins

In recent years, privacy coins became increasingly popular as they could offer privacy features that major cryptocurrencies couldn’t. First of all, what is a privacy coin? A privacy coin is a coin that encrypt its transaction(s) using zero-knowledge verifications or similar private technology. They lodge a place within the digital currency sector that many of the early adopters of Bitcoin or other major digital currencies deemed as being necessary.

When a blockchain has privacy, it helps the users to: complete anonymous transactions; and also help them maintain private account balances. And this is achieved by hiding the sender’s or receiver’s address and the amount of the transaction is obscured when carrying out each and every transaction. Some of the best ten privacy coins  this year include: Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), DASH (DASH), PIVX (PIVX), Verge (XVG), Particl (PART), Bitcoin Private (BTCP), Zcoin (XZC), DeepOnion (ONION) and Navcoin (NAV), respectively.

However there are various risks and disadvantages associated with privacy coins. Various governments and Authorities are frightened that privacy coins offer the perfect mechanism for concealing criminal operations by allowing untraceable money transfers. Actually, Robert Novy, Deputy Assistant Director of the Secret Service’s office of investigations, revealed that privacy coins are “one of the greatest emerging threats to U.S. national security”.

Also, Japan, the mother country of cryptocurrency, has put a blanket ban on all digital currency exchange that offer any degree of obscurity to end users. It’s very evident that financial regulators are anxious and are beginning to create policies which will cause a significant impact on the use, growth and development of this disruptive technology.

Source text:  https://it.coinidol.com/perch-monete-privacy/