I'm refuting the notion that there exists some causal relationship between expenditure and value. That relationship is correlation in some cases, but not causation. Plenty of coins have been mined with great expenditure of resources yet are worthless now. The inverse is also true. Some coins have been mined quickly and without much expenditure, but are highly valued.
That is a very astute point. The value of a coin other than as an investor pump has been the value of a currency, which is related to the number of goods and services it can be spent on and moreover the number of people who use it as their unit-of-account. Bitcoin has done only moderate inroads on the former and failed miserably on the latter (Peter Thiel's Bitpay actively works to not make it a unit-of-account).
The only prayer of attaining unit-of-account status is to put the coin in a 100 - 1000 million spenders' hands such that both the former and latter are synergistic. Apple Pay is going to lock up 200 million within a year or so. Time is running out, but there is still the developing world, yet I see Bangladesh has threatened to jail users of crypto-currency and Ecuador is also hostile.
I've had my mind on bigger issues than just anonymity. Anonymity is personally important to me, but not to vast majority of consumers. A coins design has to factor these realities in.