It's another anonymized coin that appears to have fancy chat/marketplace support in the main wallet application as a flagship feature.
Dash [0] does CoinJoin-style mixing at the protocol level. Some newer systems use cryptographic techniques to provide even better security guarantees. Monero [1] implements the Cryptonote protocol, which uses ring signatures [2] to obscure who owns what and who's transacted with whom. Zcash, an implementation of the Zerocoin protocol [3] that should go live in a couple of months, will use zero-knowledge proofs [4] to similar effect.
There have even been a couple of well developed proposals for changing the Bitcoin protocol to make it impractical to track transfers of coins. And one of them will probably get implemented eventually, since privacy (unlike transaction throughout) is a real concern among many of the leading Core developers.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_(cryptocurrency)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature
But here is the relevant wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerocoin
It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt, oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using public legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US).
[I'm not sure that the author is an American, but there are undoubtedly many Americans that share this attitude.]
They're putting a big corporation on the spot so they can extort money from it, make people talk about this and ultimately it's just a means to keep spying on every single brazilian citizen.
People say WhatsApp is evil for not cooperating now and pretend the government is a pure entity only seeking good.
Meanwhile they forget we probably just had a silent coup for the presidency, the whole government is corrupt and so is the justice system that is enforcing these rules. I see talks about how evil the americans are for not helping the poor brazilian government, pretending like before WhatsApp existed crime in Brazil was almost non-existent. It's honestly sad.
The best part is that this only generates animosities between citizens, who attack each other because they support "red" or "blue" allowing the corrupt to keep doing whatever they want.
The whole world has shown exemplary individuals that despite living in their corrupt environments stand up and take a stand for us all. Despite that we're stuck pointing fingers at each other with blind faith in our own corrupt governments.
Honestly you can even be right that the brazilian government is "legally" spying on us. That doesn't make it right.
And to say we the author "doesn't know about american government spying" seems extremely naive to me. We probably know more about how corrupt the US government is than any other government on the planet and I doubt he's not aware of that.
Surely this is only hypocritical if the American supports his or her government's doing these things. (I am an American, and I don't support these actions, whether taken by my country or any other.) Surely you don't want to take the position that those ruled by a morally corrupt regime by that fact lose their right to protest corruption?
Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man up!
Sometimes they look just doing activism from the couch.
Yawn.
(Of course a compromised machine can be used to sign using a hardware token, but that's a different level of compromise than getting the private key.)
Your comment is also a good example of how the concern 'people can't manage privkeys well' keeps getting handwaved away, with sad results.
