This turned into a long one... A comparative analysis of financial privacy across ten systems: Bitcoin's transparent baseline, WabiSabi CoinJoin, Lightning Network, Spark, Ark, shielded client-side validation, Monero RingCT, Monero's upcoming FCMP++, Zcash's Sapling and Orchard pools, and DarkFi's anonymous-everything architecture. Each system stakes its design on a different anonymity set, trust model, and architectural layer. The result is a spectrum from adequate plausible deniability to full untraceability, and your threat model determines which point on that spectrum you need. View article →