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RE: F**k Steemit!!!!! SMTs Will Make STEEM HODLers A Fortune
There are actually all sorts of things that could be built using SMTs. Even a secure messaging service (like Telegram) could be built on top of Steem if there were a demand for it.
It's feasible to build a fee-less privacy SMT, but I think it would require at least a little centralized tracking. That makes something like Dash better as a privacy-coin solution. I'm not a cryptographer, so I could be way off here, though. It took me a long time just to wrap my mind around Dash... if you don't know the addresses the coin is transferred to, or the amount being transferred, how can you validate the transactions? Mind blown.
This is actually the zero knowledge approach which uses an argument instead of proof. Proof is 100% sure. Zk-SNARKs is about making an argument that can give 99.[a long set of nines]% certainty that the Tx is valid.
Dash uses a more primitive but elegant solution. They emulate cash. Dash mix the coins at the protocol level in a trustless way. So everything is kept transparent on the blockchain. But there will be too much confusion on who did what as the coins have been all mixed up. This keeps everything traceable while maintaining an unbroken privacy feature that doesn't involve trust like ZCash.
I'm also just a guy on the internet and not a pro.
Oh, I see. So the mind-blowing solution is the Zk-Snarks. Dash is more like a protocol-level coin mixer. Miner takes all the transactions, shuffles them into a single big grab bag and says 'these are the inputs, these are the outputs, good luck tracing'.
Theoretically if you ran a super-node like a miner and kept your own separate record over time, you could trace everything. So it's susceptible to man-in-the middle attacks (read-only) but trace-less otherwise (assuming decent transaction volume).
You could also still do probabilistic tracking, but you would need a lot of transactions to draw a clear line between two addresses.
I remember Amanda Johnson saying if you owned 20% of the masternodes you can track 0.004% of the transactions. Masternodes doesn't do the Tx it simply connects those who want to mix. They have lots of improvements done and PrivateSend goes through multiple mixing rounds. It's economic suicide to use masternodes to attack privacy with a masternode being priced at 1000 Dash.
https://www.dashforcenews.com/privatesend-best-practices/