Privacy coins are shitcoins...
The most important characteristic of a good money is that it is credibly “hard to produce,” which makes it resistant to debasement.
All other monetary characteristics—including privacy and fungibility—are meaningless if the money is easy for someone to produce.
For example, I can obtain good privacy by using physical Mexican peso bills in transactions, but that doesn’t mean the peso is good money.
The same concept applies to so-called privacy coins.
Like all altcoins, it is trivial for privacy coin developers to change the protocol through hard forks, which they frequently do. That means their monetary policies have no credibility, and their scarcity is artificial because the developers can change the protocol. It might be a neat privacy tool, but it won’t be a good money.
It is far better to have a money that is credibly resistant to debasement—like Bitcoin—and build privacy features on top of it rather than start with something that can easily be debased but has good privacy.
Further, several excellent privacy tools are available to anyone right now on Bitcoin, eliminating any need for privacy coins.
