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Monero

Top Privacy Cryptocurrencies by Market Cap Lost Half Their Value in Less Than 2 Months

21/06/2022 by Idelto Editor

Since the end of April, the top privacy crypto assets by market capitalization went from a combined value of $10.7 billion to today’s valuation of around $5.09 billion. During that time frame, monero lost 48% in value while zcash shed 56% against the U.S. dollar.

Privacy Coin Economy Sheds Billions Since End of April


The top five privacy crypto coins monero (XMR), zcash (ZEC), decred (DCR), nucypher (NU), and horizen (ZEN) have lost significant value during the last two months. On April 28, 2022, archived data shows that the top privacy crypto assets by market capitalization were valued at $10.7 billion.

Since then, the entire lot of privacy-centric tokens lost 54% over a 54-day period. XMR exchanged hands for $227.96 back then and today XMR is $123.15. ZEC was trading for $148.92 per unit and it’s currently changing hands for $68.61 per unit.

Moreover, the Cosmos-based secret (SCRT) used to be the fourth largest privacy coin, but today it is in the sixth position. Horizen (ZEN) was in the sixth position at that time, but today it is ranked fifth.

Similarly, nucypher (NU) jumped ahead a spot from fifth to fourth in terms of privacy-focused tokens by market valuation. While XMR lost 48% in value since April 28, the coin shed 32% of that metric during the past 30 days.

ZEC’s loss since that day was 56% but over the last month, ZEC’s USD value slipped by 37%. While the largest privacy coins in terms of market cap have seen seven-day single-digit gains this past week, a number of lesser-known privacy cryptos have seen double and triple-digit gains.

Zclassic (ZCL) jumped over 129%, scala (XLA) increased by 105%, cloakcoin (CLOAK) gathered 57.7% in gains, and firo (FIRO) rose by 19.5% this past week. However, the privacy coin kurrent (KURT) lost 43.1%, mimblewimble coin shed 23.7%, and ghost (GHOST) dropped by 19% over the last week.

Monero and zcash are the top two privacy coins today in terms of market cap and out of the $5.09 billion, the two tokens command $3.082 billion of that value. XMR and ZEC represent 60.55% of all the privacy coin market caps combined.

What do you think about the current state of privacy coins and their market performances over the last two months? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Decred, decred (DCR), Double-Digit Gains, English, horizen (ZEN), Market Caps, Markets and Prices, Monero, Monero (XMR), News Bitcoin, nucypher (NU), Percentage Gains, privacy, Privacy Coin Markets, Privacy Coin Prices, privacy coins, Privacy Tokens, SCRT, Secret, xmr, Zcash, ZEC

Biggest Movers: HNT Nears 1-Week High, as XMR Rebounds on Friday

17/06/2022 by Idelto Editor

HNT was moving towards a one-week high on Friday, as it rebounded following losses in yesterday’s session. Prices have now risen for two of the last three days, and this comes as XMR climbed for the first time in nearly two weeks.

Helium (HNT)

HNT was trading higher today, as bulls re-entered the market following a red wave that hit prices during Thursday’s session.

Following a low of $9.97 during yesterday’s session, HNT/USD raced to an intraday peak of $11.42 earlier in the day.

The move sees HNT move back above its resistance level of $10, and it now looks to be heading for a seven-day peak at $11.90.

As of writing, helium is currently trading around $11.16, as earlier bulls have vacated their position, instead choosing to secure gains.

Despite this, the current short-term momentum remains bullish, leading the 14-day RSI away from oversold levels.

Currently the Relative Strength Index is trading at 55.31, which is marginally below a ceiling of 58.10, which seems to be the next target for bulls.

Monero (XMR)

June has been far from kind to XMR traders, with the token in the red for the majority of the month so far.

XMR/USD rose to an intraday high of $116.16 earlier on Friday, which comes less than 24-hours after prices were trading at $104.82.

This move follows a streak that saw monero move to lower lows for a period of two weeks.

As a result of these declines, XMR fell to its lowest point since September 2020 earlier in the week, however following today’s surge, we are now slightly above this point.

It is yet to be seen if this level will be a support level, or if bears will continue to look to settle on new price floors.

After hitting a low of 21.45 yesterday, the RSI is now tracking marginally below a resistance of 25.30, and should this point be broken, we could see a move towards $120.

Do you expect any significant moves in crypto this weekend? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Filed Under: Analysis, English, helium, HNT, Market Updates, Monero, News Bitcoin, xmr

Bitcoin Is Losing Favor On Darknet Markets

17/06/2022 by Idelto Editor

A deep dive into how Bitcoin’s lack of privacy and, by extension, its insufficient fungibility has led to its loss of market share in darknet markets.

If you wanted to buy contraband online in the last five years or so, you may have noticed that the option to pay in bitcoin — once the most popular form of payment on darknet markets — is slowly disappearing.

You may ask why it matters to you or the average Bitcoin enthusiast. (You’re presumably an excellent, law abiding citizen — good for you, but that is irrelevant.) Allow me to explain.

The Silk Road

The first major milestone of bitcoin was to be accepted as a form of money. This happened with small obscure merchants at the early stages, but as the word spread, bitcoin found itself as the “official” currency of the darknet, and allowed the creation of a market called “Silk Road.”

Silk Road was a revolutionary online marketplace. Merchants from all around the world could transact from the comfort of their own home, whenever they wanted, and could sell (and customers could buy) whatever they wanted, all with a new form of uncensorable, decentralized and easy-to-use form of money: bitcoin.

(Source)

Bitcoin’s adoption depended on markets like Silk Road to pioneer, and what was special about Silk Road is that it was an almost completely free (as in freedom) market. Free markets are excellent for adoption because they don’t require bureaucracy, permits, regulations or any other form of permission to run. The less permission required, the better a market can function. Therefore, there is more adoption, more merchants and more bitcoin use.

Without markets like Silk Road, bitcoin’s adoption is at risk, and the network is not as efficient as it could be.

The importance of Silk Road in Bitcoin’s history is, without a doubt, massive since it pioneered bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange, and still remains the biggest bitcoin goods and services marketplace in history.

Now that you have a decent idea on why such markets are so important, I’ll do my best to explain why bitcoin is not used there anymore.

The Concept Of Fungibility And Why It Matters

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fungible means “being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account.” This is untrue of bitcoin.

Each coin has its own history, and that history may be accounted for when a user tries to use his coins. That history could also lead to the user getting in trouble when using/holding coins that were used in a criminal manner, for example drug trade or an exchange hack.

In darknet markets, privacy is of high importance. Sellers and buyers want to protect their privacy in order to guarantee their safety when transacting. Law enforcement is not too kind to these types of markets and constantly monitors the websites and merchants for privacy leaks.

By default, bitcoin has weak privacy, and therefore is not fungible. Data and metadata from the Bitcoin timechain can be linked together with off-chain data to form solid evidence against a defendant in court. There have been cases that relied on bitcoin’s lack of privacy as conclusive evidence of what the government sees as “wrong-doing.” Naturally, darknet markets were looking for solutions.

Should Bitcoin developers add privacy via hard fork or would a soft fork be sufficient? Should privacy be on the application level rather than on the protocol level?

The truth is that most people, especially the administrators and merchants of darknet markets, do not care. They just want privacy. That’s one of the reasons bitcoin is losing darknet market share to other cryptocurrencies that have figured this out already.

Does one bitcoin always equal one bitcoin?

Competition

Unlike other sectors, there is a lot of competition in darknet markets, especially when it comes to methods of transacting. Markets rise and fall and so do the payment methods used in them.

Prior to 2015, bitcoin used to hold most of the market share in darknet markets, followed only by fiat currency.

After the fall of many markets and their vendors because of bitcoin’s privacy flaws and bad operational security, the use of bitcoin was starting to drop. Other cryptocurrencies, like monero, started to emerge on darknet markets because they better fit the use case. They had something that bitcoin does not, privacy by default.

In retrospect, bitcoin’s focus on being a store of value overlapped with the development of the required privacy for darknet market use.

Enhancing Bitcoin’s Privacy

Still, there are many attempts at enhancing bitcoin’s privacy, and I’ll do my best to list the most prominent of them:

Tumblers

Custodial tumblers were an early solution to bitcoin’s lack of privacy. There will usually be a centralized server that gathers bitcoin from customers and dispenses them randomly to unlink the customer from the bitcoin they sent.

Those have multiple flaws and massive third-party risks, and they are also often honeypots set up by law enforcement to catch dirty bitcoin and surveil on users.

There’s also tumbling with services that are not aware of it: This is a long process where the user will mix their bitcoin with other users’ bitcoin by sending funds to exchanges, online casinos and other sites that hold a large amount of bitcoin. This has the same flaws as custodial mixers.

(Source)

CoinJoin

A CoinJoin is a collaborative transaction that combines users’ coins in order to create a large anonymity set for them. This increases the privacy of all participants.

This is by far the most effective method for privacy on Bitcoin and has been used heavily on darknet markets as well as outside of them.

This one is a very important tool in the tech stack of a Bitcoiner, and I encourage you to learn about it and use it.

(Source)

There are also “fake” CoinJoins who leverage heuristics to confuse on-chain analysis into believing a transaction made by only one person is actually an elaborate CoinJoin. 

(Source)

Stealth Addresses

Bitcoin stealth addresses, prominently BIP47, introduced a way to have a stealth, reusable address that only discloses the real address of the user when a notification transaction was made.

This creates a new Bitcoin address for each user you connect with to ensure privacy. This was never widely used in darknet markets, but it’s decent tech nonetheless and a personal favorite of mine. 

Example of a type of stealth address: PayNym

The Lightning Network

The Lightning Network is a Bitcoin Layer 2 with a focus on providing fast, cheap and arguably private payments with instant settlement. Currently, the privacy on Lightning is great for senders, partially solving Bitcoin’s fungibility issue on-chain.

Unfortunately, Lightning has privacy flaws when it comes to receiving money. For instance, the receiver needs to provide his “channel point” when creating an invoice. A channel point is the UTXO on the blockchain that is used to back the channel with on-chain bitcoin; that means that the sender can view the receiver’s on-chain transaction history.

Merchants, especially in environments such as darknet markets are looking for simplicity, something that Lightning doesn’t currently provide.

Arguably, the reasons above are why Lightning is not currently integrated into any darknet market. There’s also a concern with the complications that come with running a Lightning node as a merchant.

There is some room for optimism though, as there are currently teams that are working on enhancing both the receiver’s and sender’s privacy, as well as the user experience issues mentioned above. This could potentially make it much more attractive to darknet markets in the future.

(Source)

What Can We Do To Fix This?

I can not stress enough how important it is that we have decent privacy on Bitcoin that everyone can take advantage of. The solution is within Bitcoin’s culture and community. There are app-level privacy upgrades that can be standardized to improve overall privacy on the network.

CoinJoins of all sorts, stealth address solutions like silent payments and BIP47, and encouraging users to run their own node and use non-custodial and open-source software where they can.

When transacting, make sure it’s peer-to-peer and not through an exchange or other intermediary. Never use a custodial wallet — you can not ensure your privacy if you count on a third party to take care of it for you. Also, when acquiring bitcoin make sure to use a non-KYC (know-your-customer) exchange. Otherwise, your data and privacy could be at risk.

My advice is to do your own research and make sure to take every precaution when using bitcoin to ensure your own privacy.

The more people that use bitcoin privately, the better privacy everyone gets, and the more likely it is that bitcoin will emerge again as the prominent currency of the darknet markets, and consequently of other markets too.

This is a guest post by Wildsnow. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Filed Under: Bitcoin Magazine, darknet, Darknet Markets, English, Fungibility, Markets, Monero, Opinion, privacy, privacy coins, Silk Road

South Africa Charges Former Monero Lead Developer With 378 Counts of Fraud and Forgery

03/06/2022 by Idelto Editor

Former Monero lead maintainer, Riccardo Spagni, faces over 370 counts of fraud, forgery, and uttering. The charges against the developer stem from fraudulent activities he allegedly committed when he was still employed by Cape Cookies.

Fluffypony Pleads Not Guilty

The so-called crypto mogul and former Monero lead developer, Riccardo Spagni, has been charged with 378 counts of fraud by the South African government, a report has said. The charges follow allegations that Spagni defrauded his former employer of more than $93,500 (R1,453,561). The crimes are alleged to have taken place between October 2009 and June 2011.

As previously reported by Bitcoin.com News, Spagni was arrested in Tennessee by U.S. law enforcement. The lead maintainer’s arrest stems from a warrant that was issued by a South African court when Spagni, who is also known as “Fluffypony,” failed to make a routine court appearance.

Spagni, who has since pleaded not guilty to the charges, is accused of cheating his former South African employer, Cape Cookies, by inflating the amount of money that was due to the supplier. According to one report, the former Monero lead maintainer would then ensure that the funds would be transferred to a bank account that he controlled. Once the payment was made, Spagni would then transfer the actual amount that was due to the supplier and retain the balance.

Spagni Waives Right to Extradition Hearing

As per court documents filed in May 2022, the former developer is now facing 126 counts of fraud or contraventions of the VAT Act. He also faces “126 counts of forgery [and] 126 counts of uttering.” Attempts by Spagni’s lawyers to have the documents struck from record were reportedly rejected by a U.S. court, a report said.

Meanwhile, the revelation of the South African government’s charges against Spagni came just a few days after the former Monero maintainer reportedly waived his right to an extradition hearing. Also, in an affidavit reportedly filed on May 25, Spagni is said to have asked the U.S. court to hasten his extradition to South Africa.

What are your thoughts on this story? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

Filed Under: cape cookies, English, Law Enforcement, Monero, News Bitcoin, Regulation, Riccardo Spagni, South Africa government

Biggest Movers: XMR and SOL Higher on Monday

16/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

Despite BTC and ETH trading lower on Monday, several cryptocurrencies managed to move higher to start the week. XMR was one of the biggest climbers, with solana also moving higher during the session.

Monero (XMR)

XMR was one of Monday’s biggest gainers, as prices rose by almost $20 from lows during Sunday’s session.

Following a low of $128.00 on Sunday, XMR/USD rallied to an intraday high of $174.62 to start the trading week.

Monday’s top came as prices surged for four consecutive sessions, hitting a near one-week high in the process.

Since these highs earlier in the day, XMR is now trading marginally below a ceiling of $173.00, as bullish strength faded as the day progressed.

The 14-day RSI is now trading at a resistance level of its own, which is below 43.14, and should it break, we could see XMR break resistance for the first time since March.

Should this happen, prices could move closer to the $200 region. A point which monero last hit only eight days ago.

Solana (SOL)

Following three consecutive sessions of gains, SOL was also higher to start the week, however prices declined as the day progressed.

On Sunday, SOL/USD finished the day trading at $53, and went on to hit a peak of $58.88 during the early part of Monday’s session.

Since then, prices have slipped, and as of writing SOL is currently trading at a level of $52.32, which is close to a one-week low.

Overall, SOL has dropped by over $100 since the beginning of April, with prices dropping below $35 last Thursday.

Looking at the chart, the 14-day Relative Strength Index is now tracking at 33.26, which is marginally below a ceiling of 36.

Bulls are likely going to attempt to push prices towards $70, if price strength moves past the current obstacle in the RSI.

Could we see runs higher in upcoming sessions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Filed Under: Analysis, English, Market Updates, Monero, News Bitcoin, SOL, Solana, xmr

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