I could spend all day going over how fantastic a job Monero is doing, but, you know, real life happens rather than spending time trying to throw mud.
I'll leave the last word to the Monero developers:
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That said, it's simply not acceptable for us (to echo your words) to put lipstick on a pig and ship a GUI that is pleasant enough, but takes 4 days to sync from scratch, requires 6+gb of RAM, sucks a ton of bandwidth, and is accepted nearly nowhere.
We will deliver a proverbial work of art, but it requires building out parts of the foundation that we had previously viewed as less of a priority (until the 202612 attack). Oh, and we're doing it on like no money, so there's that.
Finally, a sensible comment and a dose of reality.
+101
The last time Monero shills got out of hand and started a mud slinging match, they ended up being attacked on a number of different levels. I don't advocate anything like that, but you'd think they would have learnt from the experience. But then again, desperation has a funny way of clouding people's judgement.
Give me a second while I compile the other devs viewedit
This is basically the issue described in MRL-0001. If you have a ring signature with 5 possible signers, and 4 of them come forward and prove it wasn't theirs, it must belong to the 5th.
I don't really see the practical application of this, aside from the cascading failure scenarios described in that document of too much usage of mix=0 or mix=1 (which are addressed by the solution given in MRL-0004 of requiring a minimum mix factor). For example, if you are deliberately trying to trace transactions, how are you going to track down those four people given no other information? At that point all you have are one-time addresses on the blockchain. And then they still have to cooperate; if one or two decline, you're stuck. It is almost impossible and all that does is get you one output. To trace another output (which will have a completely different set of mixes) you have to start over, find four different people, and get those four to cooperate. Then go on to the next output and start over again. Etc. And if somebody along the way decides to use a mix of 10 or 20 or 50, good luck!
The replies on reddit are essentially correct on this point.
Of course Peter is also correct that zerocoin is "more anonymous" but in practice that last 1% may not matter, certainly compared to BTC at least.
Monero is like sitting in an old people's home. You know the writing is on every fucking wall, floor, ceiling and bed pan. Its just a matter of when.