Steemit Crypto Academy Season 2 Week 8 Homework Post for @levycore

Hello everyone to my submission to this week's homework task on Privacy Coins.

Image designed by me on Snappa

Introduction.

I am very excited to be part of this week's class by prof @levycore on Privacy Coin because I have been the opportunity to learn something new. Last week, we learnt about Cryptocurrencies and NFTs the week before.
I would now present my solutions to the questions asked.

What are Privacy Coins?

First of all, Privacy is the right and willingness of an individual to share what information they wish to the outside world. Privacy as explained by our prof is very important and everyone has a right to it. There are laws that punish those who break the privacy of others.

Blockchain systems have proven to be the best respecters of privacy as they allow individuals to share what they are comfortable with sharing.

Privacy coins are different sets of cryptocurrencies that have taken privacy of users to a whole new level. They give their users 100% anonymity or obscurity in making transactions. These privacy coins eliminate the transparency that blockchains thrive on by protecting and hiding the origin of transactions of their blockchain users. This is done by hiding transaction details of the users.

According to ( https://cryptoslate.com/cryptos/privacy/ ), there are 78 privacy coins in the cryptocurrency world as at the time of doing my work. Some of these incluse Moreno, Zcash, Horizen, Verge, NuCypher, Counos X, Pirate Chain, Secret, Keep Network, Phala.Network, among others.

source

Privacy coins have gained so much popularity that according to coin market cap at the time of doing this task, there was a total market cap of $15,386,018,620 and a trading volume of $1,658,523,921.

The most popular privacy coins are Monero and Dash. Privacy coins are illegal in some jurisdictions like South Koerea where the government discredits the trading of privacy coins due to its money laundering issues.

For the purpose of this task I will be looking at Dash Privacy Coin

DASH ( Dash Privacy Coin ).

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Dash is a popular privacy coin that was created in 2014. Dash Privacy coin began as a fork of BTC. It was designed as a fork to make changes to the fundamental settings of BTC and to give users faster transactions. It is regarded as the first crypto privacy coin and from its name DASH is a combination of 'digital' and 'cash'.

Dash is one of the digital currencies which promotes some of the financial transactions of the citizens of Venezuela and other Latin American countries. ( https://trading-education.com/pros-and-cons-of-investing-in-dash )

After its introduction in 2014, Dash was first called XCoin and later changed to DarkCoin. Darkcoin was also finally changed to its present name Dash in March 2015. It was founded by Evan Duffield and Kyle Hagan with a goal of being very user friendly

The Dash privacy's coin obscurity is characterized by PrivateSend. This PrivateSend strategy is used to hide transactions on dash by combining them and putting them on the blockchain as one transaction or a single string of trades. PrivateSend uses CoinJoin strategy to do the hiding of transactions on the Dash blockchain.

One nice thing about Dash is that a user can decide to either make transactions public or private by using the PrivateSend option. This is because it is not originally anonymous hence makes transaction details public until the user enables PrivateSend option. The consequence of enabling this PrivateSend feature is that you pay a bit more transaction fees but gain your complete anonymity.

As already established, Dash is a BTC fork and hence originally uses the proof of work consensus algorithm. But Dash uses the proof of stake consensus algorithm as extra protection to its masternodes. These masternodes oversee dash network and have authority to reject new blocks added by nodes that were not correctly added.

Transactions in Dash are relatively faster than its parent BTC.

Dash is also unique because it uses what is known as the X11 hashing algorithm that uses a sequence of 11 hashing algorithms, has a block confirmation of 2.5 minutes and a block limit of 2 mb. Its cheap to use as its transaction costs are cheaper than other blockchain systems.

According to the whitepaper of Dash, X11 algorithm is one of the safest and more sophisticated cryptographic hashes that modern cryptocurrencies use to secure their blockchains. The Dash X11 algorithm was also created to as a means to reduce power consumption and ensure a possible fair distribution of dash during the early days of the dash network development.

There is a regular worry of people using the dash coin to launder money but with its PrivateSend feature, governments and organizations can somewhat encourage their people to not enable that feature so that money laundering can be traced thereby making it legal.

Just like other crypto privacy coins, Dash faces the same problem of being delisted from some major exchanges because of the fact that money launderers use the network to launder money. A notable exchange that has delisted dash is Bittrex.

While some exchanges have delisted Dash from their platforms, Dash can still be found on a good number of platforms.

Exchanges that enlist Dash

Binance,
Houbi Global,
Coinbase Exchange,
Gate.io,
Bitfinex,
Kraken, among thers.

A screenshot of dash markets is shown below;

Screenshot from coinmarket cap

Dash Market Statistics

The statistics I would be listing are from coin market today as of the time of doing this homework.

Price: $191.81

Trading Volume: $530,578,992.998

Market Cap: 0.2707

Market Dominance: 0.12%

Market rank: #51

Fully Diluted Market Cap: $3,845,848,777.87

A screenshot of the dash market statistics as at the time of writing this task is shown below;

Steps In Creating A Dash Privacy Coin Wallet.

To create a Dash Wallet, the following steps are followed:

Step 1: I logged into https://www.dash.org/

Step 2: I scrolled down and clicked on download desktop app from 'get the app' section.

Step 3: I clicked on download installer from the new page and the download process started.
The download didn't take long to complete.

Step 4: I opened the downloaded app from its folder and run the installer.

Step 5: The dash core set up wizard displayed which required my permission to continue.
I clicked on continue, chose a download location and waited for the set up to install. The set up installed and I clicked on next.

dash core set up was installed

Step 6: Dash core opened and I was required to choose where dash core data will be stored. I chose to use the default data directory and clicked on ok to continue.

Step 7: My dash core wallet opened and I backed up my wallet.

Step 8: I can now send and receive DASH

Reasons For Choosing The Dash Crypto Privacy Coin.

There are so many privacy crypto coins but I chose the Dash coin because it performs faster transactions at very low costs. I also chose dash because of its ease of use and because it allows me to choose if I want my transactions public or private. This is done by enabling the PrivateSend feature.

Also, Dash has an InstantSend feature that allows quick and near-instant transactions on the dash network.

Advantages of Dash

• One adavantage of the Dash is that it has addressed the matter of financial privacy by allowing users the ability to perform transactions in autonomy.

• Dash allows a user to decide when he or she wants to make their transaction details details or public by using the PrivateSend feature.

• Performing transactions on Dash network is very fast. Transactions happen in about 1.5 seconds. Its block confirmation time is 2.5 minutes. It performs transactions faster than BTC and has an InstaSend feature that helps to make transactions fast.

• Dash has proven how stable and reliable it can be by having a market rank of 51st and a market dominance of 0.12% at the time of doing this task.

• Dash is easy to use.

• Dash uses proof of stake consensus algorithm ( PoS ) in its extra layer of masternodes as well as being run on proof of work consensus algorithm ( PoW ).

• Dash has a strategy known as CoinJoin strategy that hides transactions details.

• Dash has a capable team that fosters its development. Members of this team like the Dash Investment foundation and Dash core group searches for investment opportunities, is responsible for the payment network of Dash and handles distribution of funds for projects and the acceptance of DASH currency around the globe. This team is there to ensure the continuous growth of the Dash network.

Disadvantages of Dash.

• Dash defeats the main purpose of cryptocurrencies which is to be transparent by hiding transaction details of users.

• Illegal actions like money laundering are encouraged since it focuses on financial privacy of users.

• Dash has been delisted from exchanges like Bittrex because it encourages money laundering and other illegal activities.

• Dash network is not believed to be 100% decentralized since members of the dash team like the Dash Roots and Dash Investment foundation handle important decisions.

• Dash faces very strong competition from other privacy coins and from currencies like Ether.

• The privacy feature of Dash is rumored to not be entirely private because the creators may have a record of transactions. This damages the name of the privacy coin.

Conclusion.

Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that provide obscurity in transactions and move away from the general cryptocurrency concept of decentralization. These coins are not totally decentralized platforms but provide financial privacy. It lacks transparency and differ from traditional financial platforms because they do not require intermediaries in performing transactions.

Through this lecture, I have learnt about Dash and realized that Dash is a very popular coin and regarded by some people as the most popular privacy coin. Dash is the blockchain networks that integrates proof of Work and proof of stake consensus algorithms and runs on X11 hash algorithms.

Transactions on Dash are very fast and at low costs and give users the chance to choose if they want to keep their transactions private or not.

Also I learn that just like other privacy coins, it is used for illegal activities like money laundering which has made exchanges like Bittrex delist it from its platform.

Governments of some countries are keen to limit the usage of these coins which could see loss of funds if this happens. It is therefore required that investors do proper research and analysis before investing in such platforms.

I would end by saying thank you to prof @levycore for this very informative lecture.

Thank you.