The Superior Privacy Of EPIC Cash

By Tilman

https://substack.com/@tb358de

Monetary privacy means being the unrestricted master of your own money. No one can control what you use your money for, how much you own or even know whether you own anything at all.

The fact that this is not the case in today's fiat money systems becomes apparent at the latest when one's account is blocked, money is confiscated, transfers are not executed or the origin and further use of one's money is questioned. The icing on the cake is the increasing devaluation of money through inflation, which ultimately always leads to complete expropriation.

An alternative monetary system must therefore be decentralized, non-manipulable, non-confiscatable, scarce and, above all, private.

CBDCs, which are being introduced worldwide, represent exactly the opposite of these important characteristics. They are centrally controlled, individually programmable, confiscable at the push of a button, multipliable at will, and devoid of any privacy. With such centralized surveillance and individual control of each person's money, all freedom is finally lost.

Privacy is therefore the most important feature of a cryptocurrency if it is to be used as an alternative to the state monetary system. Any cryptocurrency whose ledger can be accessed by anyone is not much different from a state-controlled CBDC once the owner is known. Even if the state does not have direct access to crypto assets, it has sufficient other means to restrict their use or force a handover.

For cryptocurrencies that do not already have privacy protection in the base layer, attempts are being made to obfuscate users' identities with mixer via techniques such as CoinJoin.

CoinJoin is a way to combine multiple crypto payments from different senders into a single transaction, making it more difficult for outsiders to determine which sender paid which recipient.

Exchanges such as Binance have been freezing user accounts who use CoinJoin wallets since at least 2018.

"Opt-in privacy" is no privacy at all.

Some "private" cryptocurrencies allow users to choose between shielded and unshielded transactions. The most well-known representative here is $ZEC (ZCash).

The problem here is that very few, currently less than 1%, use the option for shielded transactions, as this is much more computationally intensive and hardly possible for older hardware.

The most secure cryptos in terms of privacy are those that protect it on the base layer and do not even offer the possibility to perform unshielded transactions. But even among these purely private coins, there are big differences in which method is used. Older blockchain protocols, such as those used by Monero, ZCash and Pirate Chain, have the disadvantage of unnecessarily inflating the blockchain. Even at low levels of usage, the blockchain rapidly balloons to multiple terabytes and beyond, obviously a nonstarter for mass adoption.

This sensitive data is obfuscated in various ways and stored in encrypted form on the blockchain, which on the one hand reduces scalability, and on the other hand also carries the likelihood of being de-anonymized at a later point in time as forensic methods and possibilities advance.

Truly private cryptocurrencies, such as EPIC Cash, which are based on the Mimblewimble protocol, offer the most secure and elegant method, as no sensitive data is stored on the blockchain at all. This is only possible because, similar to a payment with cash, a direct contact between sender and recipient must be established before a transaction can be completed and stored in the blockchain.

What sounds cumbersome and antiquated for an electronic payment process runs with EPIC Cash unnoticed by the user in the background via the Epic Box Message Relay Service, which is similar to an encrypted email service.

A separate file transfer is also possible, which can even be carried out offline, e.g. by means of a USB stick, if no access to the Internet can be established and is only transferred to the blockchain at a later time.

This approach has several advantages. First, no sensitive data is stored encrypted on the blockchain, which could theoretically be deanonymized at a later point in time, and second, no transactions can be lost to non-existent wallet addresses, as is not infrequently the case with other blockchains.

To buy Epic Cash: BuyEpicCash.com

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