I did a lot of work on privacy coins, and the power of statistics is staggering. Doesn't matter if you shield yourself by grouping with 100,000 people per transaction, if your anonymity set isn't _everyone_, eventually you can be singly identified.
Same goes for browsers, tracking, and "anonymized data".
> The researchers generalized their Netflix work to find isomorphisms between arbitrary graphs (such as social networks stripped of any and all data except for the graph structure), for example Flickr and Twitter , and give many examples of public datasets that could be de-anonymized—such as your Amazon purchases (Calandrino et al 2011 ; blog).
Example:
1. male?
2. East of the Mississippi?
Etc etc.
What is the point of a transaction you can't eventually confirm whether it happened or not?
Monero may utilize a heaping helping of obfuscatory steps, but those steps need to be consistent, and reversible. Otherwise, you have no guarantee that someone well placed hasn't modified the record in all the right places. Nation state's sole reason for existence is to implement solutions to these kinds of hard-to-reverse problems by sponsoring tooling and regulation to ensure that knowledge graph can be traversed. Either through mandatory reporting of the requisite metadata by exchanges that handle those transactions en-masse and who make money off it as a pre-condition of doing business, or by banning systems and instituting penalties for being discovered to use such an unreversible system.
This is the part that blockchain people don't get. If you have a public ledger, it's a matter of time until LE and regulators figure out how to legally constrain you. You may have a chunk of time when you can get away with untraceable transactions, but measures will eventually be implemented that will practically break anonymity for a lawfully operated business if you keep any sort of bifurcated record.
Then there's the final measure of making it impossible to legally reenter the fiat market from these types of assets as well. Successful money laundering is already fairly difficult. Without a way to feasibly re-enter, it becomes that much harder.
While in theory you could have two monetary instruments that fuel disjoint economic systems, there still has to be a cross-over point, and you can bet that that will be the point of maximum scrutiny.
Not saying it's impossible to make work, but don't expect everyone else to make it easy for you. The glacier may not move quickly, but it does in fact, move.