As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".
Okay well that's totally wrong.
Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain. The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.
This totally misunderstands the concept of a blockchain. To verify a blockchain (even Bitcoin) requires cryptography. Unless you rely on cryptography, you could easily be given some fake bunch of data that looks like a blockchain but is actually nonsense.
No, not really. I can follow the coins all the way back to when they were created. I can do that with my own eyes, following the account numbers. Nothing is obscured, even when mixing the coins, breaking them up into exact denominations, etc... This is how Bitcoin works, this is how DASH works.
Actually, there is no way that you could call DASH snake oil, that is ridiculous. It is simple, it does what it says it will do, it doesn't take anything other than simple math to understand the odds of guessing the owner of the coins. Simple to understand, simple to implement (with a double network) simple to protect from attack. I can understand it fully, deeply. I can not glean all the information from cryptonote to see with my own eyes that all is true and correct. Therefore I refuse to trust it, simply because I have to trust it.