Under instruction from Japanese authorities, the popular crypto exchange Coincheck will soon remove a number of high profile privacy focused coins.

Monero, Zcash, Dash will soon be delisted. Why? I am speculating, but tax is probably the key reason (we are talking about governments after all).

Governments like to spread their own FUD of “crypto is used by criminals to buy guns and drugs online” etc. but is this the real concern? I don’t think so. Dark markets have been around for years (at least since 2011) and worldwide trading volumes are low in the greater scheme of things.

But worries over falling tax? That’s enough to make any government official a sweaty mess. They are worried with good reason. Individuals or corporations that hold assets using privacy focused cryptos are simply harder to tax. So it stands to reason that centralized exchanges and the privacy coins that are traded on them (e.g. Monero, Zcash, Dash) will come under pressure.

If people start becoming concerned that privacy coins mainly traded on centralized exchanges are coming going to be removed, what are they going to do? One option is to hold a privacy coin that isn’t traded on a centralized exchange which governments can easily shut down, or force to delist.

An example of such a coin is Blackbytes, the privacy coin of the Byteball platform. Blackbytes are not traded on any large centralized crypto exchange (they are traded peer to peer) nor listed on Coinmarketcap. Which makes them much more private, but also a little harder to buy. But this tutorial shows that buying them is pretty easy (easy for millenials, your grandmother might struggle).

Should Monero really have a market capitalization over 400 times larger than Blackbytes? Monero is a PoW coin with high fees and scalability issues. Further its traded on centralized exchanges which are not private and now are coming under government pressure to delist privacy coins. Here’s a snapshot of how Blackbytes currently stacks up against some other major privacy coins:

Disclosure: despite promising his father not to gamble or make high risk investments, the author Byteball Jesus has a position in Blackbytes. Not financial advice nor official content from Byteball. Trade (or don’t) at your own risk.