Yes, but if the protocol is giving you away if you don't use IP obfuscation, then how is that anonymous in itself?
Anonymous is an ambiguous term, it means different things to different people, in different contexts
Look back at the first post on this thread. Monero (really Cryptonote, on which it is based) does not promise anonymity. It promises things like "blockchain analysis resistance." The Monero team in particular is not promising "anonymity" to anyone. We are saying that this technology protects your privacy much better than alternatives such as bitcoin, which it most certainly does.
Used carefully (which includes care about revealing your IP address), it can probably maintain anonymity, but no one is promising that. Who knows what back doors there might be in any encryption algorithm, your computer's chips, etc. IF you go far enough down the rabbit hole, you can't promise -- nor be confident about -- anything.
So let's keep the straw men to a minimum and focus the conversation on what MRO does, is trying to do, and might do in the future.
These are all correct points. Tacotime wanted the thread name and OP to use the word privacy instead of anonymity, but I made the change for marketing reasons. Other coins do use the word anonymous improperly, so we too have to play the marketing game. Most users will not bother looking at details to see which actually has more privacy; they'll assume anonymity > privacy. In a world with finite population, there's no such thing as anonymity. You're always "1 of N" possible participants.
Zero knowledge gives N -> everyone using the currency, ring signatures give N -> your choice, and CoinJoin gives N -> people who happen to be spending around the same amount of money as you at around the same time. This is actually the critical weakness of CoinJoin: the anonymity set is small and it's fairly susceptible to blockchain analysis. Its main advantage is that you can stick to Bitcoin without hard forking.
Another calculated marketing decision: I made most of the OP about ring signatures. In reality, stealth addressing (i.e. one-time public keys) already provides you with 90% of the privacy you need. Ring signatures are more of a trump card that cannot be broken. But Bitcoin already has manual stealth addressing so the distinguishing technological factor in CryptoNote is the use of ring signatures.
This is why I think having a coin based on CoinJoin is silly: Bitcoin already has some privacy if you care enough. A separate currency needs to go way beyond mediocre privacy improvements and provide true indistinguishably. This is true thanks to ring signatures: you can never break the 1/N probability of guessing correctly. There's no additional circumstantial evidence like with CoinJoin (save for IP addresses, but that's a problem independent of cryptocurrencies).
