How does the level of anonymization of Firo compare with Pirate Chain and Monero?

The other coins have privacy by default.

Owners of Firo were encouraged to anonymize their coins some time ago. What is the current level? I can see that Firo still has a rich list.

I have all three coins, btw.

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Hi welcome!

You can take a look at the current level of Spark utilization here:
https://explorer.firo.org/address/Spark
we have over 100,000 Spark transactions with over 5 million FIRO passed through the Spark pool.

There is around 700k FIRO in the Spark pool.

The rich list is really not something to be worried about but it’s a frequent simplistic argument to detract from coins that have high privacy but have transparent addresses that are typically used by exchanges. It mainly comprises of exchange hot/cold wallets (which is a good thing to know), a burn address and some people who just consolidate it in one address (perhaps in a hard wallet maybe?).

Now while there is some partial truth to say oh this means there’s less anonymity, is there really much you can tell from a Spark to Spark transaction or even a Spark to transparent transaction where the anonymity set is so high? How can you meaningfully reduce the anon set to identify the source of a transaction if a user doesn’t do obviously bad things? The Spark protocol itself is already much more private than RingCT and while there are less users, the effective anonymity per transaction is still pretty high.

The information leakage happens if someone does large unshieldings to an exchange directly but there are some exchanges that do accept Spark addresses (like NonKYC) or if you have to do it, you can do it in reasonable amounts. It is a trade off but losing centralized exchanges also makes privacy coins a niche where we want to target privacy for everybody and CEXes are important for that. If you have a private currency with little liquidity or access, it also hurts its adoption as well but yes it’s a trade off but not as big a one as you think.

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Thanks. It explained a lot for me.

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Yeah do remember that there is a difference between theoretical privacy and actual or practical privacy. Actual privacy is affected by

a) The actual privacy protocol
b) Number of users
c) Number of real transactions
d) Liquidity (are you able to convert meaningful amounts?)

I think Firo scores pretty well in a) and d) while b) and c) are actually decent for our size and bigger than many other privacy projects out there.

Thanks for the question btw!

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Firo has privacy by default aka shielded transactions in all official wallets besides Electrum-Firo. Firo allows for unshielded transactions from exchanges for compliance. However the term Firo relates or is derived from the word “fire,” which symbolizes the burning of coins in the context of its privacy features. This means those transparent unshielded transactions you receive from an exchange can be burned via “burn-to-redeem” mechanism to sever the link between transactions and anonymize the coins. Firo shielded transactions (Sparkspend) all share the same anonmity set.

Firo compare with Pirate Chain and Monero

Firo is closer to to PirateChain in the sense that both can be said to be related to the “Zerocoin Protocol”. Piratechain is basically a fork of Zcash in which both requires a Trusted Setup, compared to Firo that does NOT require a trusted setup.

Firo has been more tested then PirateChain. The Firo dev team/project has been around for longer and is more dedicated to implementing innovation and technology in my opinion. Firo was first to implement the Dandelion protocol which was later implemented by Monero as far as I know. Firo’s Lelantus Spark also inspired Moneros Seraphis protocol.

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All wallets besides Electrum-Firo resort to using spark shielded transactions opted in aka turned on unless selected not to by the user.

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