FIRO is the rebranded Zcoin, which is based on a fork of the Bitcoin codebase. This means that it shares many similarities with Bitcoin in terms of the underlying technology.
Firo's self-developed privacy protocol, Lelantus, builds on the concepts of Zerocoin, Confidential Transactions, and One Out-of-Many Proofs, which, like EPIC Cash's Mimblewimble protocol, are based on standard cryptographic primitives rather than complicated cryptographic exponent assumptions known as “Moonmath”, such as Zcash, Pirate Chain, and others.
To use Lelantus, the user converts his normal Firo coins into Lelantus coins. During this minting process, the user makes a commitment to the value of the coin without revealing the value itself.
The Lelantus protocol uses a cryptographic data structure called an accumulator to store the commitments of all minted Lelantus coins. This accumulator allows for efficient proof generation and verification while hiding the individual values of the coins.
When a user wants to spend his Lelantus coins, he initiates a "Spend" transaction. In this transaction, he proves ownership of a valid Lelantus coin without revealing which coin it is. Lelantus uses a mathematical construct known as "one-out-of-many proofs" to prove that the coin being spent is one of the coins in the accumulator without revealing which one it is.
To further enhance data protection, Lelantus allows its users to pool their Lelantus coins and combine their values into a single coin with a larger denomination. This process helps reduce the number of coins in circulation and increases anonymity, making it more difficult to trace individual transactions.
Additionally, Lelantus allows users to choose different privacy levels when spending their coins. Users can choose either higher levels of anonymity or faster verification times, depending on their specific privacy needs.
By removing the link between the sender and receiver addresses and hiding the transaction amounts, Lelantus improves both privacy and fungibility for Firo transactions.
Unlike its predecessor Zerocoin, Lelantus does not require a trusted setup phase during its initialization, as is the case with protocols based on zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge). Trusted setups always represent a potential vulnerability in cryptographic systems.
EPIC Cash, unlike FIRO, is not a fork of the Bitcoin codebase with an imposed privacy protocol, but it relies on the novel Mimblewimble protocol as its codebase. Mimblewimble (MW) is unique among known blockchain protocols in that it is completely addressless.
MW is not based on novel cryptographic assumptions, and like FIRO, is based on proven and well-understood standard cryptographic primitives. Its interactive approach (direct contact between sender and receiver) enables a completely novel structure that does not require addresses at all.
An additional compression technique known as cut-through not only reduces the blockchain size and improves scalability, it also additionally increases data protection as a side effect without the need for computationally and memory-intensive additional cryptographic steps, as is the case with all other non-MW-based blockchains.
Neither addresses nor transaction amounts are stored on the MW blockchain, which is a significant advantage not only in terms of storage requirements, also in terms of future possibilities for deanonymization of encrypted content. What is not stored cannot be deanonymized in the future.
The Mimblewimble protocol is the only one that combines data protection with simultaneous scalability improvements. Additional Coinjoin and the use of Dandelion++, VPN or Tor further increase data protection as with FIRO.
Another advantage of all MW-based cryptocurrencies is that coins cannot be lost due to an accidentally incorrectly specified address.
Due to the interactive procedure, transactions are only executed if the correct counterparty (recipient) has also signed the transaction. In addition, MW offers the possibility to execute transactions offline, which can only be transmitted to the blockchain at a later point in time.
Summary:
FIRO as a fork of the Bitcoin codebase achieves data protection with its self-developed data protection protocol Lelantus and improves it with further measures such as Coinjoin and Dandelion++. Data protection with EPIC Cash is an inevitable and unavoidable side effect due to the Mimblewimble protocol, which is further improved by procedures such as Cut-Through, Coinjoin, Dandelion++ and the use of a VPN or Tor.
Both cryptocurrencies offer good data protection and are actively being developed and improved. MW-based EPIC Cash offers the advantage over FIRO of being able to conduct transactions offline. Additionally, EPIC Cash coins cannot be lost due to incorrect address information as with FIRO.
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Hi,
I'm quite new to crypto (less than a year) and was wondering what solution found various MW crypto to that old claim https://news.bitcoin.com/researcher-breaks-mimblewimble-deanonymizing-96-of-grin-transactions/ ?
Kind regards.