Interesting ~ this probably sounds anti-privacy a bit for me to ask perhaps at this stage :-) but do you have a screencap of what it looks like (GUI) when this process (confidential transactions as described thus far in your post) is being done?
(Note: I haven't dug into Elements... yet. :-) )
There is nothing much to see.
You just have an address. You send coins to it. The fact that the world can't see the values is basically invisible to the user. Looks just like testnet. From the CLI you can see more.
Here is an example where I send 0.25 testnet to myself.
$ ./alpha-cli getnewaddress
22E8QKHaTijFemPDwKvAk9qoTgagPfp8nBQiry87MMU1h2gQbF9xzLoyG8oWnakxEcPqQmhDtd2Wrut Cy
$ ./alpha-cli sendtoaddress 22E8QKHaTijFemPDwKvAk9qoTgagPfp8nBQiry87MMU1h2gQbF9xzLoyG8oWnakxEcPqQmhDtd2Wrut Cy 0.25
ab4201ee651c1396d35d799e68d59f3bb75581cc7fff1deed5efaf670973fbc9
$ ./alpha-cli listtransactions "*" 2
[
{
"account" : "",
"address" : "22E8QKHaTijFemPDwKvAk9qoTgagPfp8nBQiry87MMU1h2gQbF9xzLoyG8oWnakxEcPqQmhDtd2Wrut Cy",
"category" : "receive",
"amount" : 0.25000000,
"vout" : 0,
"confirmations" : 0,
"txid" : "ab4201ee651c1396d35d799e68d59f3bb75581cc7fff1deed5efaf670973fbc9",
"walletconflicts" : [
],
"time" : 1433908060,
"timereceived" : 1433908060
},
{
"account" : "",
"address" : "22E8QKHaTijFemPDwKvAk9qoTgagPfp8nBQiry87MMU1h2gQbF9xzLoyG8oWnakxEcPqQmhDtd2Wrut Cy",
"category" : "send",
"amount" : -0.25000000,
"vout" : 0,
"fee" : -0.00005479,
"confirmations" : 0,
"txid" : "ab4201ee651c1396d35d799e68d59f3bb75581cc7fff1deed5efaf670973fbc9",
"walletconflicts" : [
],
"time" : 1433908060,
"timereceived" : 1433908060
}
]
#then we can see how the world sees it.
$ ./alpha-cli getrawtransaction ab4201ee651c1396d35d799e68d59f3bb75581cc7fff1deed5efaf670973fbc9 1
{
"txid" : "ab4201ee651c1396d35d799e68d59f3bb75581cc7fff1deed5efaf670973fbc9",
"version" : 1,
"locktime" : 0,
"fee" : 0.00005479,
"vin" : [
{
"txid" : "76c4b906eaebdfc7685d1870aa3c4d57c8dce2fe7b924a7147c410ebffa8bee2",
"vout" : 0,
"scriptSig" : {
"asm" : "0c0315abc52bced031a61ef1d8987470794540e46890b25b1f0f2b73b39d85ca37056e60fbf9a33 70c11ef7229575d937fd2935c9024ed2b1bc4a6fd473d3a9e01 0359134c3055c290a7a0499f0dfb78742ce964c1c4c8e17407898d5d05956c894e",
},
"sequence" : 4294967295
}
],
"vout" : [
{
"value-minimum" : 0.00000000,
"value-maximum" : 42.94967295,
"ct-exponent" : 0,
"ct-bits" : 32,
"n" : 0,
"scriptPubKey" : {
"asm" : "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 fd23ecdd4fb918bd88a319294b1f0ede5f701165 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG",
"reqSigs" : 1,
"type" : "pubkeyhash",
"addresses" : [
"n4bSHiZXaApHquce1KEB8tfCZH7ZpDnUYe"
]
}
},
{
"value-minimum" : 0.00000000,
"value-maximum" : 42.94967295,
"ct-exponent" : 0,
"ct-bits" : 32,
"n" : 1,
"scriptPubKey" : {
"asm" : "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 fd5eff1963631488f624513719e866d92eae83e5 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG",
"hex" : "76a914fd5eff1963631488f624513719e866d92eae83e588ac",
"reqSigs" : 1,
"type" : "pubkeyhash",
"addresses" : [
"n4cf44LWhzi5KtbTaA1YHFBLWtgn89TF4K"
]
}
}
]
}