DERO could be an alternative with their full encryption of user balances and transactions

Monero has been used and proven for over a decade.

No one wants to switch to some unknown tech with an unknown development team.

The latter is arguably the more important of the two.

I remember a scare some years back around a Monero developer that turned out to be a nothingburger, but it goes to show how important it is that the core development team is trustworthy, or at least sticks to their beliefs and don't capitulate to third-parties (whether public or private in nature).

Monero is the one coin I can confidently say I trust the core developers on, it's had a strong history of making the right decisions where it counts in my opinion (breaking ASICs w/the monero-classic situation, making the official client default to downloading the entire chain, etc)

How much of the Monero development team is actually known? Last I checked some of their core team were anonymous but that might have changed

known as in have a proven reputation / track record.

Proven but pseudonymous, like Satoshi was.

Adopted and used first by darkweb pot dealers, like Bitcoin was.

Price supressed by government and banking hostility, like Bitcoin was.

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Dero privacy got busted about a year ago due to developer incompetence

https://gist.github.com/kayabaNerve/b754e9ed9fa4cc2c607f38a8...

After seeing this and their weak attempts at making a CPU-based PoW, I don't have any confidence in dero or its developers.