"One of the advantages of a distributed ledger is that it is broadcast. Thus it is impossible to tell who is reading it. That adds a lot of anonymity right there"
Really smooth? No that is NOT adding anonymity to transactions.
Yes really. For the reason I stated.
That many Bitcoin clones all do things more or less the same way is not an argument. They pretty much have because they never get into the underlying implementation and the developers have no real knowledge of cryptography, so they all have to attach various forms of mixing on top of blockchain. How you expect that to be more secure than building the anonymity into the actual cryptography is a mystery to me.
It's an interesting version of FUD you guys have come up with to attack Monero. I commend you for your creativity. "It's all public so it can't be anonymous!" "Someone will crack it!"
BTW, most or all internet traffic is probably being logged right now by the NSA and probably others. Almost certainly anything encrypted is. It is not a sound assumption to think that ANYTHING you send out to the internet won't exist forever and can't eventually be cracked. At least with a public ledger, many more people will be trying to crack it and one of them might tell you if he succeeds, at which point you can take remedial action. All that TLA stuff happens in secret -- it might be cracked and you continue to use for 30 years, although honestly I strongly believe that most of the amateur-hour efforts that pass for "anonymous coins" are likely cracked from the start by the NSA and others. There is at least SOME chance that some real crypto is not fully cracked.