http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1200/RR1231/RAND_RR1231.pdf....
Put another way, Bitcoin is anonymous in
the following sense: It is as though every bank transaction and every
bank-account balance is known to anyone with an Internet connection;
the only information that is unknown is who owns each bank
account, something that can be inferred from user interactions.
Clearly,
such “anonymity” is unacceptable for everyday economic
life, and therefore additional safeguards must be built in.28
For many (if
not most) existing VCs, including Bitcoin, the current process of maintaining
anonymity amounts to learning a degree of cyber-operational
security or “tradecraft,” which seems unrealistic for the layperson.
....
"It is difficult to evaluate the ultimate security (and usability) of
Zerocash, as it has not been tested in the crucible of real-world use
and evaluation, though its theoretical mechanisms have more rigorous
security proofs than virtually all existing VCs. By contrast,
Dashcoin is
currently being used and seems to be reasonably anonymous (certainly
more so than using Bitcoin without additional privacy-enhancing technology),
though it has only been in existence for about a year as of this
writing; its current market capitalization much less than that of Bitcoin,
thus an equal comparison is difficult to make.4"
...I'm bolding the part of "tradecraft" and layperson because I'd really like to see out of the box anonymity in both the IP part and the transaction part. If you give the layperson an out-of-the-box anonymity, you are tapping a much broader audience than the geek crowd who can set up their own IP anonymity/obfuscation.
I'll quote myself here in reference to a post in another thread:
Both coins are dropping and I would rather hold bitcoin than any of these coins. I feel that anon coins fad have gone and nobody are interested in these coins anymore.
Nobody was interested in BTC prior to its spike either.
Wait until there is some random crackdown on BTC and then suddenly everyone is rushing to buy anon coins as a safe haven or diversification asset.
Let's say tomorrow morning there are BTC crackdown operations and this creates a surge in demand for DASH by tens of thousands of BTC users.
Are we ready to give those people a combo package of trivially-easy-to-use anonymity that combines both the transaction part and the IP part (tor/i2p, etc)? If we don't have IP obfuscation embedded and out of the box with a few clicks of the mouse, from inside a GUI, it will be a disaster in terms of the ability to convert people's interest (which will be a given due to new needs arising) to immediate adoption.
You don't want the "customer" to leave because you are requesting him to do extra stuff that he has no time, knowledge or desire to do on his own. So give him a few checkboxes with IP obfuscation, slidebars with the level of security he likes and voila, DASH is much better positioned to "receive" people (=adoption). It is already the prime candidate due to marketcap position and existing adoption, plus the weaknesses of the competition (command line usage that most ordinary people won't go to), but this shouldn't be the "bar". The bar should be higher.
LOL But I haven't read it yet, and it's just chilly enough to curl up with my touchpad and read 
