But no other privacy coin - NONE WHATSOEVER - has an unknown development team. Think about it: should a powerful government want to crack down on Monero or DeepOnion, for instance, they could infiltrate or even eliminate and replace the development team, since the project members are publicly known. XSPEC is protected even against such personal attacks.
Really amazing stuff, if you ask me.
monero is at a point where it has a very large community with some 200+ individuals contributing code. It would be virtually impossible at this point to track down the entire "team" and prevent somebody to fork the project and carry on. It doesn't even matter now who started it. And generally that is the best approach because to be honest tracking an individual nowadays is pretty easy. Real anonymity is very hard to achieve these days and only through very illegal means. Even then it's a matter of how hard the said government is trying to get you and if they are willing to play dirty or not
FYI there are other coins with anonymous devs (see skycoin) and it's not generally perceived as an advantage.
A large community of developers is not necessarily a good thing: aside from loss of agility and flexibility (there is a required overhead for coordination and governance to ensure the work of 200 developer are aligned), having that many developers means there will be specialization as well, which means it's possible to compromise the entire system by compromising a small group. Having 200 developers is NOT the same as having 200 levels of redundancy (which indeed would give some form of security against compromising).
And "virtually impossible" is not impossible for a government agency with pretty much unlimited resources.
Curious what you think the link is between achieving real anonymity and taking illegal actions? Why would one be related to the other?
I agree that in general and for "usual" project anonymity is a disadvantage. For the ultimate privacy, I am still convinced it's an advantage.