Anonymity cuts both ways. On the one hand, there are people who like it and even demand it. On the other, the main stream commercial interests fear it. Governments don't care for it either since it creates an opportunity for money laundering and crime.
Having experience in banking and finance, my personal feeling is that ease of use, integrity, and speed are more important for the survival of alternative currencies than anonymity, although I think anonymity is a feature that is necessary for the initial launch of the concept. But for mainstream acceptance its not as important as the other features I mentioned.
In any case, we still need to figure out how to convince merchants that their consumers will use these coins to buy goods over the internet instead of using credit cards and paypal. Then we need to convince holders and takers of these currencies that the value will not fluctuate dramatically. No one will want to transact in a currency that will be worth substantially less 5 minutes after they receive payment.
We are in the infancy of this process right now. We have a long way to go and I think we will be forced to adapt to the market several times before we find the right formula. But we would be stupid not to look at the current state of all of these currencies and the reduction in value they are all experiencing. We are being given a signal. We need to be open minded with our response.
Excelent points DMDCreeper. There are a lot of ready made solutions that Diamond could adapt if there was such need.
Besides, what ordinary people are so afraid of that they need anonymous transactions? I haven't got terrorists (whoever they might be), criminals, etc in mind; there are so many other ways of laudring money or paying for a hit without the need to use Diamond or other crypotos. Ordinary user is effectively anonymous, unless there is a very strong case against such individual that national security agencies decided to go through the trouble to track him/her down.
In terms of acceptance, we can forget (for the time being) about being exclusively accepted by merchants. The whole industry is shifting towards payment processing platforms. CoinPayments was the first good attempt on the part of Diamond to be used for trades where the merchants could specify which coin they accepted. Now, we are the part of Cahseer, which is a much improved concept, making Diamond payments mobile.
The problem we face with Diamond is its initial scarcity. There is simply no volume to become an effective micro payment coin - to make up for the lack of volume the price of Diamond has to rise. If the price per coin is high enough people will simply be buying stuff with microDMDs /decimals/. To rise the price we have Diamond Multipool and now Diamond Cloudmining, these will certainly put the buy pressure on Diamond.
There is also another plan to cause even more buy pressure but as of today it proved hard to execute, unless we form a company. We are researching our options as to how best do it.
The new wallet GUI is in the making; it's a long process to come up with something that's good looking and doesn't feel like just a slighltly improved version of the prevoius concept. We are aimng at refreshing the image of Diamond with it. I hope people will like it
We started reaching Chinese market thanks to our new Chinese Community manager. We have been non existent on that market, that's why we have to start the whole image building from scratch, which is going to take some time. Once we gain market awareness we should see positive buy action as well.