Privacy is a cornerstone of a civilized society. It's not something we should always maintain. For an example most crypto projects are open source and many of the developments happen with very high level of transparency. But as long as NAP is maintained a person's financial data should only b disclosed if they agree to. In some platforms like STEEM, EOS etc. this is impossible to do and the users are expected to act with this radical transparency in mind. i'm totally fine with it. It's a compromise that allow us to have excellent performance and STEEM for one is a public social media platform that is a lot like Reddit/Medium.

But You Can Always Go The Extra Mile

That is how the civilizations are evolving. the world was fine before PayPal. It was fine after PayPal. But some people decided they want more and then came Bitcoin. Then came even better products. First it was just trusted mixing. Dash revolutionized everything with trustless mixing. If you think this kind of obscurity is weak, go ahead and check out https://dashradar.com

It's pretty solid but it is always good to have some alternative at hand and gladly we have many.

Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More

This little gem has involvement from Stanford University, University College London and although I'm not too happy about it Blockstream is also involved. It was originally made to be used on bitcoin and here goes the whitepaper:

We propose Bulletproofs, a new non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol with very
short proofs and without a trusted setup; the proof size is only logarithmic in the witness size.
Bulletproofs are especially well suited for efficient range proofs on committed values: they enable
proving that a committed value is in a range using only 2 log2
pnq ` 9 group and field elements,
where n is the bit length of the range. Proof generation and verification times are linear in n.
Bulletproofs greatly improve on the linear (in n) sized range proofs in existing proposals for
confidential transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Moreover, Bulletproofs supports
aggregation of range proofs, so that a party can prove that m commitments lie in a given range
by providing only an additive Oplogpmqq group elements over the length of a single proof. To
aggregate proofs from multiple parties, we enable the parties to generate a single proof without
revealing their inputs to each other via a simple multi-party computation (MPC) protocol for
constructing Bulletproofs. This MPC protocol uses either a constant number of rounds and
linear communication, or a logarithmic number of rounds and logarithmic communication. We
show that verification time, while asymptotically linear, is very efficient in practice. Moreover,
the verification of multiple Bulletproofs can be batched for further speed-up. Concretely, the
marginal time to verify an aggregation of 16 range proofs is about the same as the time to
verify 16 ECDSA signatures.
Bulletproofs build on the techniques of Bootle et al. (EUROCRYPT 2016). Beyond range
proofs, Bulletproofs provide short zero-knowledge proofs for general arithmetic circuits while
only relying on the discrete logarithm assumption and without requiring a trusted setup. We
discuss many applications that would benefit from Bulletproofs, primarily in the area of cryptocurrencies.
The efficiency of Bulletproofs is particularly well suited for the distributed and
trustless nature of blockchains.

• https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf

There Is A Catch

Bulletproofs is an amazing innovation. unlike things like zk-SNARKs or other Zerocoin Bulletproofs are much easier to implement and they are Trust-LESS. This is a huge deal because out of the other trustless solutions Dash is the only one that is usable. Monero cannot scale and he fees are too damn high. My sources:
https://bitinfocharts.com/monero
http://www.blocktivity.info

With Bulletproofs, the addresses of the sender and receiver is visible. Only the amount of funds transferred is kept hidden. I'm no expert but I have a feeling that data-mining could be a major attack vector for this kind of privacy. What Dash has been doing for 4 years is more effective because all Tx amounts are kept visible while obscuring who's paying who.

Amazing News From PIVX

I've been repeatedly catching PIVX leading the way in many cryptocurrency evolution and this one more just like the above.

How It Works

You can automint a percentage of your PIV into zPIV. You get new zPIV and your old PIV are burnt. when you send your zPIV to someone, they get freshly minted PIV with no previous history attached. So the receiver isn't going to be holding zPIV. All of this is done through zero knowledge proofs and the pioneers Zcoin and Zcash haven't been able to bring this tech to the mobile which is going to be very important as you will be making a lot of purchases while traveling.