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I'm not saying the currencies are safe against active attackers, or people wishing to just mess with the block chain, this is just about privacy and scanning the block chain.

Assuming we can create a secure hash function and people use truly random numbers then the ring signatures used in Monero are secure in that they reveal no knowledge about who signed the message. Anyone of the private keys associated with the public keys could have been the signer. Your next option would be to try and track transaction inputs and outputs but even these permit any possible value. So just looking at the block chain, even if you have a quantum computer and can solve the discrete log problem (DLP), you aren't going to learn much. As an active attacker, one who is creating outputs that they hope their intended victim will then use as inputs, and again possessing a way to solve DLP, maybe but you will have to solve one DLP for every attack. There might be a way to double spend many times if you could solve the DLP once. That's because you could solve a relation between two generators of the elliptic curve group used by RCTTypeFull, but that exploit will likely be closed before anyone develops a working quantum computer large enough to attack Ed25519.
Further reading:
https://www.getmonero.org/libr...

Zcash uses a different group membership algorithm. It could be broken if you had a quantum computer, but again you have to solve either the DLP or RSA problem for each transaction you wish to investigate. It will be years before that computing power is feasible to spend on one transaction.
There are no good resources, that I would recommend, for Zcash and other zero coin derivatives.

There is a reason the darknet markets are rapidly moving away from Bitcoin and into Monero
SHUM

https://getmonero.org/2017/04/... FYI: the link is more than a year old.

Quoth TFA:

the thieves could turn a massive profit in an untraceable currency

Bitcoin is not "untraceable", else many companies like IBM, Oracle, and a slew of startups would not be selling blockchain analytics tools. There are unraceable cryprocurrencies, like Monero and ZCash. But Bitcoin? No.

No sense mining BTC with them; ASIC farms have pretty much made it impossible to find blocks with anything but specialized hardware. There are cryptocurrencies whose mining function is specifically designed to be ASIC-resistant and therefore which are still profitable to CPU mine. Monero is probably the most popular of them (and has the benefit of an encrypted blockchain, so others can't see the wallet to which your botnet is sending its ill-mined coins)

Bitcoin's use for illicit transactions is rapidly declining, and being replaced by secure encrypted blockchains like Monero
http://getmonero.org/

I didn't know that. A better crypto-currency has always been more of a threat to bitcoin than any market "burst bubble" from citizen investor.

Bitcoin's use for illicit transactions is rapidly declining, and being replaced by secure encrypted blockchains like Monero http://getmonero.org/

Monero is not viable on GPU? You do know there's Monero mining software for both AMD and NVIDIA, right?

As you noted, with a tumbler you are trusting that the people running the service aren't malicious actors (a government or other organized crime racket, ha ha). But there are cryptocurrencies -- notably Monero -- that have such mixing built into the protocol itself. no reliance on a benevolent 3rd party

This is why more and more darknet marketplaces are accepting Monero. It's like having a mixer built in to the protocol itself. And to make things even better, the Monero blockchain is itself encrypted. Unless you are one of the participants in a transaction, you can't see what address the coins were sent from, who they were sent to, or how much was sent. And they are in the process of integrating with i2p for even better anonymity.

Disclaimer: I hold quite a bit of Monero. But that's because I honestly think it's the best and fastest-growing "privacy cryptocurrency"

An ICO (initial coin offering) is a similar concept, but far more general and interesting; rather than buying shares, an investor buys cryptographic tokens (called "coins") that represent some kind of ownership of (or affiliation with) the endeavor.

While this is true in theory, in practice most ICOs are scams: someone creates a new cryptocurrency out of thin air by cloning an existing open source project and offers these coins for sale. Greedy non-savvy investors buy these hoping they will get rich when the price increases (that never happens), while the founders fill their pockets with the money.

Examples of such scams are Superior Coin (a ripoff of Monero), SureCoin (another copy of Monero started by the scammer who started Superior Coin), and ParagonCoin, just to mention a few.

Personally I'm glad they're banning these ICOs.

And thats why Monero is growing faster than bitcoin. Website: https://getmonero.org/home Its very clever in the way it obfuscates the data in such a way that you get privacy, blockchain, openness and security. Possibly the best form of electronic money in existence right now, just a bit unknown to the world still. The supply of monero is similar to bitcoin (about 14 million right now) and they trade at about $12.50 per monero. So its digital money you can send anywhere without a bank and its untraceable.

I always build my daemon from the latest github.

If you always build your daemon from the latest master, you must have failed to update for the last 6 months at least.

Does BBR really need 4GB RAM to run? Wow!
People report the monero daemon using less than 100MB nowadays, and I myself have it running between 100 and 300MB on http://moneroblocks.info. (which currently is the only blockexplorer that shows the participating inputs in the ring-sig ;) )

Also, sync time with an SSD and decent network connection gets done in a couple of hours.

Don't take my word on it, people! Go try it out: https://getmonero.org/downloads/

Anyway, this isn't the only issue making it slow/heavy/conservative when compared to something like Boolberry.

Do you want to enlighten us?

Or maybe you think that active development makes things go "slow/heavy/conservative"?

https://github.com/cryptozoidberg/boolberry/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/graphs/contributors

Monero is the most anonymous cryptocurrency currently; it has been in use since April 2014. Go to http://getmonero.org/ and http://reddit.com/r/Monero to read more.

I've been into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since early 2011 after I saw one of the first Bitcoin slashdottings in late 2010. I went mostly "all-in" around 2012 after some trouble with my bank, never looked back, and have happily lived 90%+ crypto ever since. If I was a betting man I'd say look at Monero: http://getmonero.org/ It's definitely not "ready for primetime" just yet, but the foundation is there and is moving in the right direction. Reminds me of Bitcoin in 2011. Good luck.

all crypto currencies are in fact traceable via their block chain.

Monero has built-in mixing.
https://getmonero.org/home
https://www.reddit.com/r/moner...

Use Monero instead of Bitcoin if you are seeking privacy and untraceable transactions: http://getmonero.org/