These coin all employ some anonymity features. Some real shallow (such a Verge only routing traffic over TOR) and some more elaborate (such as ZCash with zero knowledge proofs).
If you define truly anonymous as having no way to see transaction addresses and amounts, no way to check balances and history and these features all active by default... it would leave you with Monero and Aeon.
Of course other differences exist, such as vulnerable crytography (Zcoin), a potentially flawed "trusted setup" (ZCash, ZenCash), etc
Truly anonymous would mean if you bought $100 worth of anoncoin under your own name from an exchange and then played two hands of poker at an online casino, there would be no way for the casino and the exchange to collude and identifier you. Is that the case for any of the systems you listed?
Exchange gives you coin, and then have no way of telling what you did with it. Exchange just knows you are given 300 coins at the time of transaction, nothing more.
When I checked out Medium, they had no Markdown support and very limited formatting options. Not good for code examples. Also no option to use your own domain.
Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. All in all it seems like a better option to me.
group hug
I got the invite some two weeks ago. The acceptance of my sloppy application already lead me to believe they were opening up the site pretty soon. Just working through the backlog.
Just a thought: will Newtonian dynamics not introduce a significant error over these speeds and distances? I believe that Newton's physics are just a simplification of Einsteins Relativity. I am obviously not a physicist, so I hope somebody can straighten me out.
Also I am not sure that we know all the weights of the celestial bodies with enough precision not the introduce an error while performing a 'slingshot'. Rosetta has propulsion and my guess it that it can be used to actively correct small mistakes in positioning.
Any error due to using Newtonian dynamics instead of relativity is almost certainly swamped by guidance error and such. These things are never perfect, and corrections are always needed during the trip. They are really good, and the errors are small, but they're there, and errors due to relativity are smaller still.
To give you an idea of the magnitudes involved, consider that GPS satellites do need to be aware of relativity. GPS depends on extremely accurate clocks, to the extent that relativistic time dilation due to the altitude of the satellites becomes important.
However, the necessary correction for relativity is only 38 microseconds per day. That's about 0.00000004%. It matters for GPS, but that's a special case.
For another example: the orbital precession of Mercury was one of the first indications that there might be something beyond Newtonian gravity. Newtonian gravity would have Mercury following a steady ellipse, with small changes due to the gravitational influence of other bodies and the fact that the Sun is not a perfect sphere. However, Mercury's orbit precesses (which is to say, the ellipse itself rotates slowly) more than could be explained by influences from the Sun and known planets. This was initially thought to be due to an unseen planet called Vulcan, but none could be found. Eventually it turned out that general relativity explained the discrepancy perfectly.
The total precession of Mercury's orbit is about 574 arc seconds per century. The amount of that due to relativity is about 43 arc seconds per century. That's about 0.12 arc seconds per year, and it means that if you used pure Newtonian mechanics to predict Mercury's position one year from now, relativity would cause your prediction to be off by (very) roughly 17km. Not much, and trivially corrected for using the spacecraft's thrusters while on course. That's equivalent to a velocity error of 0.5 millimeters per second on the spacecraft's part, and I don't think rockets are that accurate to begin with.
You know the masses of celestial bodies relatively well from their observed trajectories and it is not too difficult to include relativistic corrections in your calculations (though active corrections using thruster will still be extremely helpful).
I imagine finding the best trajectory in the first place to be the more difficult and interesting problem.
(Not an ESA guy, just wanna-be-condensed matter physicist.)
There are people from ESA here, so I hope they can write about this in more detail. From what I know, Newtonian dynamics is good enough to move around the Solar System at the speeds we commonly employ.
We've been doing gravity assists for some time now, so I guess this topic is mostly figured out, though probably some active corrections are required. Again, maybe the ESA guys will chime in. Or InclinedPlane ;).
In all fairness, it was not completely shut down. The main computer and some heating was left active. I do not think that time keeping was biggest worry.
That being said, a hundred other things could have gone wrong and mission control would have had no idea that something happened. Meteorite impacts, misalignment of the solar panels, software bugs, radiation damage and a faulty wake-up sequence are just some things that spring to mind.
Bad thing is that most of these could result in the spacecraft not even being able to send out a ping. Or any information that would tell engineers what went wrong and how to fix it for future missions.
Imagine just listening to silence and not being able to find out if any of it was your mistake.
If you define truly anonymous as having no way to see transaction addresses and amounts, no way to check balances and history and these features all active by default... it would leave you with Monero and Aeon.
Of course other differences exist, such as vulnerable crytography (Zcoin), a potentially flawed "trusted setup" (ZCash, ZenCash), etc