If sync time is your argument against actual anonymity rather than pretend anonymity, that's rather unconvincing.
Ok, I'm clueless.
Question: Is Anonymint clueless? Is he blind that he does not see "actual anonymity"? When he says that most of the anonymity will come from IP obfuscation, is that a vote of confidence for the protocol itself?
He bases this on 2 things:
1. He wants built-in IP obfuscation. You could also argue that it's an independent function that's already available with other software. In any case, I think CN-based coins will eventually have I2P once a dev gets around to it. It makes sense to make it easier (for the less technically-capable user), but this is not a systemic limitation and it doesn't have anything to do with CN v. Zero v. CoinJoin.
He also wants something better than Tor or I2P. I asked him what, and he said what he envisioned doesn't exist yet.
AnonyMint is an idealist who will find fault in everything (not that there's anything wrong with that). You should maybe see his other post where he compared the
practical aspects of the various anonymity systems and said CN probably has the best trade-off choices. gmaxwell said the same. I'm paraphrasing - neither of them are necessarily pro-CN.
2. He misunderstood the implementation of ring signatures. Outputs are broken down so matching pairs can always be found and rendered indistinguishable. He initially thought that they weren't, which would require exact matching of totals. Hence the comment that the opportunity to use ring signatures is rare. You can actually
always use them with the way BCN implemented it. (It's actually CoinJoin that has this very problem, because it requires concurrent participants.)