From what little I'm familiar with though, wouldn't something like ip-obfuscation be more exclusive of the currency protocol itself and have more to do with data is transferred through an IP? At least, if it were to surface in the world, I would imagine it to be aimed at something much more main-stream than a cryptocurrency. Like an email system or some other sort of messaging system would seem a much more valid proof of concept, rather than having it surface in a cryptocurrency for the first time.
Yeah IP obfuscation could be more generally applicable to internet activities. That is why Tor and I2P exist. Unfortunately they may not be that perfect. Let's pull a guesstimate out of our arse that they are anonymous 80% of the time to a global adversary and thus to tax authorities and governments. That means every 5th of your transactions is not.
edit:
Automatically (is this enforced or optional per wallet?) breaking the transaction outputs into constant units, e.g. 1 coin, 0.5 coin, 0.25 coin etc, will radically bloat the block chain. The ring signatures are going to be huge if you need to obfuscate among say for example 256 payers (1/256 probability of being non-anonymous) each for several inputs, as well as payee addresses for each of those fractional amounts.
For a transaction of 1234.567800000000, the transaction is broken down into parts 1000,200,30,4,.5,.06,.07,.008 .
Everyone has to agree on the fractional amounts, so they can't be arbitrarily chosen as you have shown.
Rather with a power-of-2 standard (I'm a programmer so I can write the first 20 entries in following list without a calculator):
0.0001
0.0002
0.0004
0.0008
0.0016
0.0032
0.0064
0.0128
0.0256
0.0512
0.1024
0.2048
0.4096
0.8192
1.6384
3.2768
6.5536
13.1072
26.2144
52.4288
104.8576
209.7152
419.4304
838.8608
The break down would be 1234.5678 = 838.8608 + 209.7152 + 104.8576 + 52.4288 + 26.2144 + 1.6384 + 0.8192 + 0.0256 + 0.0064 + 0.0008 + 0.0004 + 0.0002.
I have asked about the bloat on the chain before, and the consensus was that with the visible competition enforcing a 10% tax on mining to afford some privacy, then the storage space used to hold the blockchain would be a much less cost. I would like to know much more about this though, because the blockchain is noticeably larger in this protocol by a lot.
The issue is not only the cost of the storage. There is the download speed also. And other complex factors. A tax is probably also going to have Tragedy of the Commons effects, as I explained in my numerous discussions of why transaction fees will never work for Bitcoin in the long-run. There are other articles out now about these by others. Such discussion will take us off on tangents I don't feel like having right now.