I am @AnonyMint, the guy who first pointed out to @gmaxwell in 2013 (or was it 2014?) that his idea for blacklists to prevent jamming of CoinJoin wouldn't work, because (or unless the anonymity doesn't work) the participant's identities can't be tracked.
I was the first one who pointed this out to Evan the creator of DarkCoin (Dash), which prompted him to invent the masternodes concept, and Dash went on to become the highest market cap anonymity coin (with the ostensibly worst technology, lol).
I also invented the never fully published
Zero Knowledge Transactions at about (but I claim before) when Shen-noether merged Cryptonote's ring signatures with Blockstream's Confidential Transactions homomorphic hiding of values. I claim I achieved the same but with the much more efficient Compact Confidential Transactions (wherein I think I showed how to remove the proof-of-square that made it lose some of its efficiency, but I am not a mathematician so I may be incorrect). I still haven't published this white paper because it needs some edits. Will get around to it someday I hope.
Since then I have also privately invented some new technology for offchain anonymity, which I have yet to fully document and formalize.
Anonymity will never be perfect. Your anonymity will always be subject to possible foiling by hackers, National Security Agencies (e.g. the NSA), and large corporations.
More important than anonymity is privacy. We don't want your average Joe to be able to see every thing we do.
For large valued transactions, I believe Zcash's
technology will ultimately win. It has the largest anonymity set which can't be practically spammed, because the anonymity set is every coin and every transaction that can ever be done.
For smaller valued microtransactions, I believe my offchain technology will win. The NSA can foil it, so the governments shouldn't be concerned. But your average Joe can't foil it.
Additionally I don't think Proof-of-Work block chains will win (but their failure may be some years from now),
especially those which don't leverage Bitcoin's SHA-256 ASICs security such as Zcash's EquiHash and Monero's CPU/GPU hash PoW (which btw
Komodo does do correctly and it also claims to have Zcash's anonymity technology).
"ASIC resistant" proof-of-work will be subject to rented hashrate attacks double-spending.
About the impending death of Proof-of-Work, I know a secret (soon to be released that I believe will forever change our ecosystem).
Stay tuned...