Bitcoin’s staggering growth and adoption brought strong scrutiny to its transaction rates capabilities. Discussions about this particular shortcoming erroneously judge technological limitations as a static characteristic of the offering and sometimes conclude the debate, advising in favor of cryptocurrencies with faster transaction rates. These deliberations fail to understand that blockchain technology is different than past storage solutions and that transaction speed, although important, is not a core principle or commitment that will likely define the long-term success of a cryptocurrency.

At a high level, Bitcoin’s blockchain can be viewed as a list of all Bitcoin transactions ever performed. This list is duplicated in various computers on the internet and is open for anyone to copy. Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous but pseudo-anonymous. Although senders and receivers may not be known, transactions and their values are public knowledge that blockchain exposes. It’s possible, for example, to know precisely how much a ransomware campaign capitalized. It’s also possible to know how many payments and the total compensation an organization using a static Bitcoin address received. In most cases, these disclosures done by default are not a desirable feature.

Information that becomes public cannot be recalled. If the identity of a party in a pseudo-anonymous transaction becomes public, it may be possible to infer or narrow down the possible identity of the involved counterparties. Even if new functionally is created to change the unsettling disclosure of information, the patch won’t change the fact that previous transactions are public.

For this reason, commitment to privacy must be built in from day one in blockchain-based solutions as there is no way to go from public to private, but it’s always possible to go from private to public. Monero, a privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency, attempts to achieve anonymity by providing unlikability between the “to” and “from” addresses in a transaction. Also, Monero hides transaction values in the blockchain and leverages an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication to hide transaction IP addresses.

Decentralization is another hot topic for cryptocurrencies. The ever-growing use of technology in our daily lives increases the opportunities for surveillance from both public and private sectors. Organizations are interested in personal information such as consumer spending habits and will trace, aggregate and analyze any the data that becomes available. Bitcoin aspired to be a cryptocurrency that runs with no central authority. Regrettably, Bitcoin mining, the process of verifying and adding transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger, seems as though it’s primarily available to those few organizations that can afford significant investments in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) to mine coins. As a result, small players mining with off-the-shelf, commercial hardware don’t stand a chance to compete against these organizations.

To mitigate the opportunity for centralization and control, cryptocurrencies such as AEON and Monero favor mining algorithms that diminish the performance gap between CPUs and specialized hardware by demanding comparatively large amounts of memory or the use of built-in CPU instructions, which are difficult and expensive to implement in special-purpose devices such as ASICs.

The undesirable side effect of this architectural decision is the rise of cryptocurrency mining malware. Instead of demanding a ransom in Bitcoins to recover data, modern malware takes over the victim’s computer and uses it to mine its own payment. Despite the obvious abusive nature of this practice, it raises the question whether devices with enough computing power will have a mode in the future to mine cryptocurrencies for their owners while not performing their core tasks. A proof-of-work algorithm that attempts to be egalitarian should gain more popular adoption over time than solutions that promote centralization because it’s within reach of a broader demographic of individuals.