How private are those then? Isn't it true that at least everything is visible to at least all participants?
EDIT: in other words, my question is actually whether your claim has relevance, considering how most crypto currencies aim to be public (or that's at least my impression).
How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.
Blockchain currencies make all transactions public. Given that, if they're not anonymous it's kinda like posting everyone's credit card statements online.
But most crypto is anonymous, not private. It's usually worse than even banks since anyone can look up your transaction history given your wallet address. All it takes is one place where your wallet links to your identity and you have even less privacy than with banks.
Privacy is actually a common misconception when it comes to cryptocurrency. More currencies, bitcoin included, are actually the opposite of private – every transaction is completely public for everyone to see. There are currencies (i.e. Monero) that aim to add privacy, but by and large it doesn’t exist.
Trivially, cryptocurrency is less private than credit/debit cards, because every transaction is written to the public log. This is true of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum.
Coin tumblers exist for all these currencies. But these a) cost a small fee, and b) are back to centralization, requiring you to trust the tumbler maintainers not to record the transactions.
ZCash[1] is the only cryptocurrency I know of which attempts to actually be private, but the unpopularity of ZCash relative to Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash/Litecoin/Ethereum shows that most people involved in cryptocurrencies actually don't care about privacy.
Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.
Accurate for BTC, although it's worth noting there are some privacy coins with blockchains that currently have very limited susceptibility to chain analysis, and thus as far as we can tell are private.
EDIT: in other words, my question is actually whether your claim has relevance, considering how most crypto currencies aim to be public (or that's at least my impression).
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