More Anonymous, More Secure — Next Level Cryptocurrency Privacy Is Here

Carl Rivera
3 min readSep 30, 2021

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Cryptocurrency has long been billed as the “anonymous and secure” way to privately move money around.

Is it, though?

While crypto may hide major details from casual scrutiny, if you look a little deeper it’s a whole different story.

Really, every transaction done using cryptocurrency is entirely public — literally, anyone can see it.

What they can’t see is your name.

Does It Matter?

Well, that’s up to you — how private would you really like your transactions to be?

With your name hidden but all of your transactions visible, it’s not actually as hard as you might think to track them back to you.

Let’s use an example.

Photo by Executium on Unsplash

If someone happens to know that you used crypto to purchase a particular service, they can then search that service to see what accounts have purchased it.

By narrowing down which day you purchased it, and using other purchases linked to the same account, it would be easy to find out just which account is yours.

After that, every transaction you’ve made using this supposedly “anonymous” currency is now an open book.

New Technology

Thankfully, things are always getting better.

The real problem with the current setup is the way our crypto wallets function — they don’t make the transactions anonymous, just the wallet holder.

Now that doesn’t have to be the case, because some developers have found a solution.

In short, they’ve found a way to make all outgoing transactions anonymous as well, so no one can possibly link your crypto wallet to you by matching the transactions.

How Does It Work?

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

New ultra-secure wallets can use features like built-in VPNs and mixing protocols to obscure every little bit of data.

They use as many obscuring tactics as they can, to create an entire impenetrable grid of anonymity around your transactions.

This includes interesting features like mixing pools, where transactions from multiple users get mixed together so none can be traced back to a specific user.

It works a little like this — imagine you want to buy a service for $20. Instead of doing it directly, you put your $20 into a “pool” of money from multiple people.

It’s still your money, and it’s going towards your service, but it’s taking an indirect route.

That pool may include money from two dozen different people, who are all making a different $20 purchase.

In the end, it’s possible to tell that someone using your wallet put $20 in the pool, but it’s impossible to tell which of the two dozen purchases was made using that money.

How Can You Use It?

Okay, enough about what it is and how it works, how can you make your own transactions truly anonymous?

Well, that’s easy, just use one of the new, more advanced wallets that use the new technology.

Photo by André François McKenzie on Unsplash

Everything else is done for you.

They’ll take care of your anonymity, mixing pools, and privacy options.

All you have to do is figure out what to purchase next.

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Carl Rivera

“Everything you don’t know is something you can learn.”