I've talked to Smooth a lot about anonymity telling him it's not useful unless you can fix scaling first. If you only have enough TPS for a clearing mechanism between banks, on-chain anonymity doesn't do anything when most transactions will be done off-chain anyway. Since you seem to have the exact same viewpoint, how exactly would this design even help Monero? Does it at least reduce overhead to Bitcoin level?
My opinion is that collateral bid systems using PoS where the top 100/500/1000 wallet addresses that choose to lock stake and act as deterministic nodes is the easiest way to solve scalability at the moment. Larimer thinks you can have anonymity in such a system already:
Confidential Transfers hide the amounts being transfered while still allowing those who validate the blockchain to verify that the balances transfered sum to 0 and are not negative. Stealth transfers are used to automatically generate a unique key for every transfer. The combination of these two features means that it becomes pratically impossible for a 3rd party to identify how much you have sent or received or who is sending money to whom.
Without achieving the scaling part first, won't this purchase be kind of useless when it will inevitably be overun by some kind of second tier anonymity system latched on top of a deterministic PoS network?