Chaum’s Elixxir

David Chaum is the original creator of decentralized Ecash (where double-spending would remove anonymity) and the concept of mixnets for anonymity.

Quick look at the brief white paper:

1. It is only a token ledger, no smart contracts nor STEEM-like functionality.

2. The so called “scaling strategy” doesn’t actually address scaling issue that every node in the system has to verify every block. Nor does it allow block to produced simultaneously. In short, it doesn’t scale to 100s of millions of transactions per second all over the globe.

3. Elixxir employs innovative stateless hash-based signatures, but hash-based signatures do not scale with Moore’s law.

4. Mixnets are inferior to Zerocash’s zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs. Also it is technically incorrect to state that a single honest node can protect anonymity, because of correlating metadata, including for example the fact that a transaction will send more than one token in Elixxir providing potentially multiple blocks for the transaction to be deanonymized.

5. The claim that Elixxir can’t be 51% attacked is myopic. It can still be 51% attacked at the holistic level because a 51% attacker can reorder transactions in a long-range attack which thus removes the transactions for the forfeited security deposits. Thus the claims of egalitarianism are not correct. Aggregation of the controlling resources can still put the system under centralized control.