Some cryptocurrencies are designed with privacy protection in mind. The digital transaction ledgers are still published on the open internet and available to anyone, but a privacy coin can shield the identity and balance of each wallet on the blockchain.
What are privacy coins?
Sometimes a cryptocurrency user wants qualities you’d usually find in a standard currency like the U.S. dollar. For example, cash transactions are hard to track even if you have the serial number of each bill that was used. In situations where this anonymity is desirable or even required, you could achieve a similar effect by using a privacy coin.
Privacy coins explained
In most respects, privacy coins work just like any other cryptocurrency. They use a public blockchain network to record and validate transactions, and owners of the digital currencies can store them in various types of cryptocurrency wallets.
However, privacy coins wrap these basic functions in layers of additional security to anonymize the transactions and/or the identities of each wallet holder. A normal cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin (BTC +0.17%) or Ethereum (ETH +0.50%) is easy to track as it moves from one digital wallet to another, and the amount of Bitcoin and Ethereum sitting in these wallets is public knowledge. Privacy coins use various tricks to hide that information.
The hard-to-track quality makes privacy coins useful in certain cases:
- Maybe you run a business and want to manage cryptocurrency payments to and from your suppliers. A Bitcoin wallet would let suppliers see how much money you have in the accounts, which could give them an edge in negotiating new contract rates.
- Let’s say you want to trace the ownership lineage of your cryptocurrencies back through history, and you find out that some of your Ethereum was previously used in a shady or criminal activity. Could that tainted cryptocurrency land you in hot water if a criminal investigation leads back to your wallet? With untraceable privacy coins, this risk doesn’t exist.
- When your wallet’s transaction history is publicly available, the day might come when e-commerce vendors analyze the wallets of potential customers and adjust their prices to your proven spending habits. Privacy coins dodge this issue by keeping your data secret.
The digital ledger at the heart of any cryptocurrency creates risks that don’t exist for payments made in physical cash. Any dollar bill is just as good as any other dollar bill, and it doesn’t really matter who owned them. This interchangeable quality is known as fungibility, and privacy coins go out of their way to achieve a similar effect.
The same qualities also give privacy coins the ability to perform criminal activities such as money laundering and payment for illegal goods or services. This potential for illicit use has made privacy crypto coins illegal in many jurisdictions.
That’s why leading cryptocurrency trading platforms such as Coinbase (COIN -3.16%) and Binance won’t let you buy or sell some of these privacy-focused digital coins right now. Future regulations might clear up the market, but they could also lock it down even tighter.
How privacy coins work
Each privacy coin uses a different strategy to anonymize its transaction data and wallet balances. Generally speaking, these strategies involve temporary addresses and splitting up each transaction into a large number of smaller ones. Crucial information about each whole or partial transaction can also be stored in encrypted form instead of a publicly readable ledger.
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