The whole idea of "breaking" anonymity is notionally a nonsense anyway. All cryptocurrency is anonymous in the way that credit money isn't because credit money can’t even exist without a specified 'account holder’ (who’s state of debt or credit represents the ‘money’). Distinctly, blockchain balances exist independently of owners, so by definition one is not "breaking" any anonymity by tracing a transaction from one address to another.

Obscured blockchains have adopted a “credit-money” privacy model because their design philosophy tends to identify an address with a “monetary account”. This is their glaring flaw. Cryptocurrency is not an account of anything because as a monetary unit it is unbacked. Consequently, it’s a commodity in its own right - albeit an electronic one, but that was the whole point behind the invention of bitcoin.

The appropriate “privacy” model is therefore a cash one, not a credit one. What counts is making the balance at each address as indistinct from the balance at any other address as possible, which is why Dash has prioritised its monetary objectives accordingly.

Blockchains are public by nature. The phrase “public-private key cryptography” tells you all you need to know about the appropriate context for obfuscation - i.e. the problem has already been dealt with. You do not go trying to “re-solve” it by obfuscating the public key and turning it back into a private address because you’d then be denying the very basis of why that technology was invented.

The “holy grail” of blockchain based money is therefore to implement optimal fungibility in a public blockchain who’s discrete spendable balances remain under private control. That gives you “cash” rather than an “account of cash” which is what’s needed to acquire a public consensus around its monetary veracity.

It also gives you the precise design priorities behind Dash as a cryptocurrency.