Many people believe that because Bitcoin is decentralised, it is also private. This is not true. Since the inception of Bitcoin there has been a keen interest in Privacy tokens. Individuals that support privacy tokens are not necessary criminals or bad actors, just have strong beliefs over retaining their individual rights for financial security.

Here’s a brief of 5 privacy tokens and how they compare.

ZCASH

Launched in 2016, ZCASH is a fork of Bitcoin and focuses on privacy. Unlike Bitcoin which reveals the transaction details, Zcash all you see is a transaction with a timestamp.

Zcash employs a zk-SNARK, a form of zero knowledge cryptography. A zero-knowledge proof allows someone to validate a transaction without revealing any form of information (about sender, recipient etc) itself.

DASH

Digital Cash , often reffered by its ticker DASH  was created in 2014 and utilises PrivateSend technology.

Mulitiple Dash transactions are combined into a single master transaction, which is then signed by each sender and then published to the network. Since there are multiple signers, it’s not possible to determine which sender transacted with which counterparty.

Zcoin

Zcoin( ZXC) uses zero knowledge proods from the zerocoin protocol, one of the frequently cited white papers.

When you want to send Zcoin to someone in the network, new zcoins are mined with no previous history. The”minting” is offset by burning of previous coints in the wallet.

Monero

You cannot talk about privacy without talking about Monero (XMR). Monero was released in 2014. All transationc on the network are mandated to be private. This ensure that participants don’t have to trust others to maintain their privacy.

It has ring ct system, the ring system ensure that amount of transactions happening on network stays hidden, it has sum of transactions split into “ring” where it becomes intermixed with other transactions of similar amounts so no single person can know about other’s amount of transaction.

PIVX

PIVX is another coin based on zerocoin protocol. It was introduced to world in January 2016 and it’s name is an acronym for Private Instant Verifiable Transaction.

The project was forked from Dash and subsequently they added zerocoin protocol support. Each coin in PIVX network has no history attached to it , making it 100% fungible.