Many options, many junk, and a lot of excessive marketing, but which coin does offer the best privacy, and of course overall the most security. Well there are not enough good options. Most of them are just vaporware, while others have serious flaws.

Let's review them all shortly, these are my opinions based on my research:

Monero

It certainly looks like Monero is the king, but it just had a fatal bug 1 week ago:

• https://getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-bug-in-cryptonote-based-currencies.html

The entire Cryptonote technology that Monero uses for privacy enhancement was compromized. Totally. Which means that the developers are really caught with their pants down. If they can't detect such grevious bug in time, then maybe their coins are shit. Although they have fixed this in Monero, but the bug is still inside Bytecoin, DashCoin, DigitalNote. So by extension all of these coins are crap. If it happened once, it can happen again. Zero day bugs are a very very big threat.

So I don't know, maybe Monero really needs 2-3 more years of real security review and audits before we can consider it a safe currency. But for now it's crap. I mean this just happened 1 week ago FFS. WTF?

Dash

Dash also has a privacy feature named PrivateSend, however I believe the way it works is that it relies on Master Nodes to mix transaction. So if some Masternodes (or their ISP) is recording their transactions, then all transactions are public. So it's a sham. Now we know for sure that ISP's record internet traffic, thanks to Snowden, so it literally provides 0 Privacy. It's just a big sham.

Well yes it's good to hide transactions from your wife, but it certainly doesn't help journalists or activists in an oppressed country to hide from their tyrannical government. In fact it's quite immoral and dangerous to advertise something as anonymous which is not, since activist lives can be in danger.

Shadowcash et al

Allegedly it's a scam, many people have said that it's a scam:

• Main thread closed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=745352.12300
• Main dev jumped the ship to another project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1473811.0
• More: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1609461.0
• More: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1863861.0

Zcash

Z-cash is very questionable, I think it has a black box setup which means that you had to rely on the devs to set up the system in order to be anonymous and I think the number of new coins issues is unknown. Which means that there could easily be a backdoor in it, or a bug like in Monero and we will have no idea about it.

There there were many people who were skeptical about it, INCLUDING ME:

• https://steemit.com/money/@profitgenerator/z-cash-is-probably-a-scam
• https://medium.com/@yobanjo/zcash-founders-might-make-60-million-in-first-year-2c9658b2dc5d
• https://medium.com/@yobanjo/watch-out-zcash-is-another-scam-5dc8add99f65
• https://decentralize.today/five-reasons-zcash-is-the-most-corporate-cryptocoin-youve-ever-seen-a77ac430b0e8
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5axon2/zcash_scam_kicks_junseth_from_slack_after_he_asks/
• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1342065.0
• https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@hms818/zcash-has-gained-80-after-partnership-with-jp-morgan

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Conclusion

So it really looks like most of them are scams, shitty marketing attempts or just plain and simply don't work. I mean it's too good to be true to begin with. Having 100% privacy is really hard to achieve in this day and age of surveillance.

It's not impossible, but we will need a lot more technology for it. My best bet is on Monero though, even if they had this shitty bug recently, it is still probably the single best candidate for now. Maybe there is one better out there, but for now this is the best one in my opinion.

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Sources:
https://pixabay.com
https://www.dash.org/promotional-graphics/, license CC BY-SA 4.0

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