Any mistakes? Ping me / comment please.

Anyone that’d like to update the data feel free to do so by giving a comment under this google sheets link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12M65jqq8g_m_gdNcfCTaTC8Liu7zdQVr6KBPs_9TtFo/edit?usp=sharing

Below are some further explanations and discussion of what’s going on. Please though DYOR — do your own research.

Bitcoin

“Bitcoin is an open and permissionless cryptocurrency”

Check out https://www.weusecoins.com/

Bitcoin is digital cash and a digital asset (property) that can be transferred digitally online in a peer-to-peer fashion without intermediaries and without the ability of a third party to sanction/censor transfers — as long as the transaction is directly peer-to-peer (ie not through an intermediary like an exchange). Bitcoin is easy to transfer, secure to store and transport, and can be sent anywhere in the world and stored in a hardware wallet. “The future is here but is not evenly distributed yet” — namely, no one uses Bitcoin for payments yet, but it is fulfilling other functions and will continue to expand.

Bitcoin has gone through major volatility and is still volatile, which many argue makes it a ‘poor’ store of value. However, given it’s tech and design characteristics (fixed supply, cryptographic security and inability to produce more bitcoin than pre-programmed due to difficulty adjustment) and track record over the last 10 years, it can make a great store of value.

Bitcoin serves as a store of value and a medium of exchange, even if it faces scalability issues (so do Monero, Zcash, Grin), and these will be resolved over time as they are technical issues in the end.

Bitcoin is not (yet) a unit of account nor are any other cryptocurrencies, above all owing to their huge volatility, and lack of mass adoption (yet), but already denoting crypto/token trading in terms of BTC is already in itself a positive signal of things to come. As Bitcoin stabilizes in the future, it might become a unit of account.

Bitcoin has been evolving continuously and is actually more than money — it is programmable digital money. It is also, uniquely, the first ever resource (even if digital) created that’s finite.

GRIN

“Electronic transactions for all. Without censorship or restrictions.”

Check out https://grin-tech.org/

Grin empowers anyone to transact or save modern money without the fear of external control or oppression. Grin is designed for the decades to come, not just tomorrow. Grin wants to be usable by everyone, regardless of borders, culture, skills or access.

Grin is based on the MimbleWimble protocol. MimbleWimble is a new blockchain design. It is output-based like Bitcoin but without script (ie. in Bitcoin, every output has a script (script pubkey) attached to it. In order to spend one of them, you must verify the conditions in the script. In MW/Grin outputs only have public keys: no script. Hence MW/Grin transactions are scriptless) and it offers benefits like privacy by default, massively prunable, and is based on elliptic curve cryptography.

MimbleWimble history (http://lesceller.com/doc/dandelion.pdf):

August 2 2016: Initial Release “Tom Elvis Jedusor” posts an .onion link on Bitcoin Wizard IRC leading to a paper: “Mimblewimble” October 10 2016: Follow-up Paper Andrew Poelstra releases a paper explaining Mimblewimble in details October 20 2016: First Implementation Ignotus Peverell starts the first implementation of Mimblewimble: Grin

MW doesn’t support scripts but thanks to elliptic curve cryptography it has scriptless contracts which enable, so far:

— Multi-signature transactions

— Atomic swaps

— Time-locked transactions and outputs

— Lightning Network

MW’s interesting features include very fast sync, low resource requirements (storage, network). In Grin you are able to build a transaction graph but all the nodes will look random and indistinguishable in it with the only way of linking them to real world identities being possible only by being involved in the transactions yourself. Due to this, Mimblewimble/Grin has privacy features, but it also has the first really impressive, true scaling solution in crypto. Privacy-wise in comparison Monero is great if not better, but its scaling is really bad.

Grin has a tough emission model to attract capital but it reaches Store of Value status in the future. Due to this it faces a catch-22 / chicken or egg problem, and overcoming it will require strong community belief and strong use-cases early on.

What is a fresh exciting development is enabling grin payments on the bitcointalk forum. The admin of bitcointalk Theymos also gave some constructive critique to improve transactions in Grin.

MONERO

“Monero is a secure, private, untraceable currency”

Check out https://www.getmonero.org/

Monero’s decentralized governance model is necessary to make it work.

Monero has Ring Signatures, Ring Confidential Transactions, Stealth Addresses, LMDB, subaddresses, ASIC resistant cryptonite algorithm. But Monero’s scaling issues are significant and bulletproofs are meant to provide the ability of Monero to address this problem. Monero’s core devs are currently (Feb ’19) implementing bulletproofs, these should improve scalability potentially by 80%, which would still make the chain 5x larger in size than Bitcoin.



Monero is designed to be resistant to Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining. Monero = “coin” in Esperanto. Monero has a dynamic block size & dynamic fees.

ZCASH

“Zcash is the first open, permissionless cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography”

Check out https://z.cash/

Zcash uses zero knowledge-SNARKs which hide transaction amounts, inputs, and outputs on the blockchain. However, a key difference is that transactions on Zcash are not private by default and zk-SNARKs are computationally heavy to create (take 1–3 mins on a PC to create a private transaction on Zcash) thus most users do not enable them, hurting the overall privacy of the network. The % of fully shielded (entirely private) transactions on Zcash is <1%, which is terrible from a privacy coin POV. There’s an upgrade to ease this (Sapling) coming up. Also, zk-SNARKs require a special secret key to set up the system, via multi-person ceremonies, which could be leaked and used by a perpetrator to print zcash and destroy the value of the coin.

Zcash is not really that scalable. It is lighter than Monero, but it is still way heavier vs Bitcoin.

For many other comparisons check out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2669844.0

Follow me on twitter at @kowalskr