I seriously doubt the feds are going to be able to coerce view keys from transactions to put any links together.
They don't have to. The job's done for them by providing them with a nice neat "black hole" to stand guard over.
For crypto to work as money, it has to have a "face" in as many sectors of commercial and economic life as possible because one economic sector "levers" the value from another in a way that goods and services can't, being sector-specific. Thats what makes the $USD the criminal currency of choice - because it can be earned illicitly in one sector and pop-up somewhere completely differently to be spent on kids christmas presents.
The second thing is, as far as surveillance goes, no cryptocurrency networks (obfuscated or otherwise) tell you a thing about identities unless you're already in possession of significant off-chain information. That can only be gleaned from the entry and exit points to the coin supply - i.e. commercial trading, exchanges, wage earning etc. So if you create an unbacked monetary network that is entirely obfuscated then you're basically kissing goodbye your long term value proposition from widespread adoption on 3 counts:
1. all your boundary points will get regulated out of existence by virtue of tainting the entire network as a suspicious trading indicator
2. you'll end up getting used exclusively as a sector-specific payments system instead of a store of value which leaves you wide open to any competing technology that happens to provide the same service as yours does but cheaper, more conveniently or more reliably
and that's without even considering the biggest ticking-timebomb calamity of all...
3. Confidence. As I explained in this post, the whole point of the Satoshi transparent model was to 'fix' the one thing that has always prevented a trust-free decentralised token from taking hold and garnering real monetary value - public confidence and how to "not" puncture it. It's unlikely that bitcoin would have made it through all its various rollercoaster rides of the last 8 years IMO without complete and un compromised transparency. Gox, malleability crises, heists - you name it. Whether the Feds are crawling all over it isn’t the point. The point is it has the public crawling all over it every minute of every day which is why it remains robust in the face of rumours, scams and technology crises.
The reason why Dash’s privacy model is miles ahead of anything else is because it looked beyond the horizons of "technological obfuscation" and dealt with each of those 3 points independently.
All the cryptonote model does is deny those challenges even exist and bury the whole blockchain from sight. An exercise in nerd-wizardry but monetary gimmickry and not exactly an inspiring prospect. But then again as I’ve stated, that approach was never invented for defining trustless money anyway.
It was invented for carrying bank-backed credit money which is why obfuscation (encryption) was made the priority over authenticity.
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I had to post this here due to hard trolling lately 
