Check out whitepapers on NEO, XVG, STRAT, LISK, IOTA, BTS, DGB, ETH, EOS, SHIFT and ARK. They are all different in what they offer and propose but try to figure out which of these have actually accomplished any of the things they have put on their roadmaps. Some of these projects have better developers and thats where I think the value is to be found.
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Thank you for the direction. I'm intimately familiar with BTS - I host a BTS wallet - complete with a faucet for new account registration, and am decently well read on Eth and EOS.
The only symbol you mentioned that made me wonder "wtf is that?" was XVG. I honestly do not see what it is that Verge offers, or even attempts to want to offer...
Looks like a clone of anoncoin from where I'm sitting. It's admirable that they want to make a privacy centric coin. There is nothing admirable about their course of action though: tweak a few parameters (like every other bitcoin clone), bolt on I2P/Onions, and call the result "privacy-centric." I expected to see the words "ring signature" or "zero knowledge" somewhere in that whitepaper, instead I found a detailed explanation of how onions route.
There is simply no way that bolting onions onto BTC's codebase can yield a significant measure of privacy otherwise absent, because origin IP of a tx is not where BTC has privacy issues - the bitcoin network doesn't even pay attention to nonsense such as origin IP of transactions, and simply proxying your wallet through onions will yield the same results as integrating it the way Verge does.
Move along folks, no innovation going on here. From where I'm sitting, all I see is a coin created in an attempt to enrich its creators. After looking at their white paper, I don't see the point in doing further research into very basic questions such as "was there an pre/insta-mine?"
If you need a privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency, there is no better choice than Monero (XMR).
ZCash had its trusted setup. 'nuff said.
Dash had an instamine which potentially breaks the privacy that is supposed to be delivered by darksend - since it relies upon the idea that multiple masternodes facilitate tumbling, and no one party would have access to that information, and the likelihood of one party running all the masternodes that tumble a given coin would be essentially zero, since setting up a masternode requires 1k Dash . Problem is - there were 1.5M DASH mined in the first 8 hours after launch. This suggests a high likelihood of there being individuals who hold enough Dash to Sybil attack the masternode system if they so desired.
PIVX is a fork of dash. It's distribution is more fair, but the privacy is based on CoinJoin, the privacy enhancing characteristics of which leave much to be desired. I've read a paper that described how to deanonymize a CoinJoin tx history, but my Google Fu is refusing to produce the paper I'm thinking of.
Bytecoin (BCN) - Instamined early on. If you read up on it, you will find it appears that the devs deliberately crippled the miner they released to the public (so that their miners would have an edge, I imagine). Additionally, the bug discovered but never exploited in XMR that would have enabled an attacker to print money was exploited in BCN.
Did I miss any other privacy centric coins?
The only thing that comes close to Monero in terms of privacy is Stealth transactions on BitShares (proper UI in the works). However Stealthed accounts can't use the DEX (only make transfers) and funds have to be transferred from a stealth account to a regular one eventually, and the pool of possible coins when you make a stealthed transaction is limited to the amount of a smartcoin that has been stealthed - whereas on Monero all transactions are obscured, and this is enforced by the network, hence a much larger anonymity set.
You may be completely right but a few points you missed. XVG has a few upcoming releases that are quite interesting which include an i2p and tor android wallet, additional security features and smart contracts. Also its a multi algorithmic coin which ends up making it quite impossible to 51pct it. I've got no problems with Monero other than it recently lost its use case (alphabay) and there are many scheduled forks upcoming to fix problems with its RingCT protocol. XVG and XMR are the two top privacy centric coins in terms of value I would say. Dash is great too with its secondary network providing true value compared to other coins. Thanks for your thoughts and excited to discuss other projects in the near future.
Hardly anyone used XMR at AlphaBay. If anything, recent events are likely to drive a surge in the use of XMR in that particular sector of the crypto-economy. Also, Monero doesn't have forks scheduled to fix problems. Monero has hard forks scheduled twice a year regardless of whether there are features being added/fixed that require it. It's actually a very intelligent decision, because when debating new features, the narrative turns from "Is this upgrade worth the risk of a hard fork?" to "Is this upgrade needed based on its merits?"
Edit: I will look more into XVG. FWIW, what you mention about XVG and I2P make me think of Monero next big upgrade. It's called Kovri - it's an I2P router/node, that will be used for the broadcast and relay of transactions. Blocks will still be relayed normally, but transactions will be broadcast to the network over I2P, hiding any possible IP address info of nodes broadcasting transactions.