TLDR: this patch allows you to:
- see all addresses, including change
- see which addresses are linked together (does recursive expansion of address linkages)
- select which address(es) to send from, rather than letting the client to chose for you
Very nice. I hadn't seen this before now.
why conflate the two issues?
Because to non-technical users, "privacy" is a single feature, not a series of separate technical issues.
You have an excellent point about how non-technical users view privacy. But you have to take a series of small steps to achieve a larger goal. In privacy mode, Google Chrome lists several ways your privacy could still be compromised, yet that didn't keep them from adding privacy mode. This patch should be added to the official client, but will obviously not be the last privacy-related improvement to bitcoin.
I updated the code for 0.4 but never released builds since I didn't perceive any demand for them. The code is now updated for the 0.5 qt gui so once 0.5 is officially released I'll release builds with my patch as well.
Awesome. I'll patch 0.5 when I start using it.