Privacy Coin Wheel

The privacy coin wheel picks one of twenty privacy-focused cryptocurrencies at random. This is the one category on the site where the label describes a testable technical property rather than a market narrative — though the strength of that property varies enormously between entries.

The one label here that is testable

Most categories on this site are claims about intent. This one is a claim about cryptography, and cryptography can be examined. Either the protocol conceals the sender, the receiver and the amount, or it conceals some of them, or it conceals none of them and calls itself private anyway. That question has an answer, published in a paper, and the answer does not depend on how anybody feels about the project.

The answers on this wheel differ enormously. Some entries hide all three fields for every transaction with no way to opt out. Some offer a shielded mode alongside a transparent one. Some obscure amounts but leave the graph of who paid whom fully visible, which is often the more revealing half.

Optional privacy is weaker than it sounds

This is the counter-intuitive part and the most useful thing on this page. A protocol where privacy is a setting protects its users less than one where it is mandatory, and the reason is statistical rather than technical. If almost every transaction is transparent, the small number that are shielded become conspicuous by that fact alone. The anonymity set — the crowd you are hiding in — is only as large as the number of people making the same choice.

So a chain where a few per cent of activity is private offers something closer to a flag than a cloak, whatever the underlying mathematics can do. Mandatory privacy avoids the problem by removing the choice, at the cost of being much harder to list on exchanges that need to see amounts.

The regulatory pressure is real and is not a technical fact

Several coins in this category have been delisted in particular jurisdictions, and that has happened to protocols whose cryptography was never in question. Availability and legality are separate from whether a scheme works, and both vary by where you are.

This site has no view on any of that and is emphatically not a source of legal advice. It picks one of twenty names at random. What that name is permitted to do where you live is a question for somebody with actual expertise, and the answer has changed more than once.

What is on this wheel

Market data provided by CoinMarketCap — CoinMarketCap. Rank, ticker and name only; this site stores no prices.

This list is a judgement about what belongs in the category, not a market-cap ranking, so it carries no date. See how the lists are chosen.

Questions

Which privacy coins are on this wheel?

All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: ZEC, LINK, XMR, CC, LTC, DASH, NIGHT, XTZ, DCR, STRK, H, TRAC, ZAMA, ZK, BDX, ZANO, MINA, BILL, ROSE and CELO. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.

Do all of these actually hide transactions?

To very different degrees. Some conceal sender, receiver and amount by default. Others make privacy optional, which weakens it for everyone, because a shielded transaction stands out when almost nobody uses one.

Are privacy coins legal?

That depends on where you are, and several exchanges have delisted them in certain jurisdictions regardless of the underlying law. This site takes no position and is not a source of legal advice.