no need to twist yourself in knots, we've already done it
eMunie is 100% anonymous, impossible to trace transactions, only the sender and receiver ever know it happened......we've done the same with the system email, chat, IM, vault storage and everything else to come, all "hard" as you put it
The [ANN] thread is so sparse on details. How is it determined which node gets to write the new block?
what aspect of it makes transactions anonymous? your transactions still have multiple inputs and outputs right? that could be used by researchers to build models of user activity.
You can disregard a lot of whats in the ANN thread, when that was posted the anonymous transaction model was not developed or even thought of.
Blocks are not generated in the same way that BitCoin and other alt's create them, there are no "miners" competing to create a block and the verification of transactions works completely different.
The transaction data is encrypted with the public keys of both the sender and receiver, only they can decrypt this information with the corresponding private key. The sender creates a secret pair S1,S2 for the transaction.
S1 is placed in the transaction output which is recorded in the database for all nodes to see, S2 is passed to the receiver along with other data in the receivers encrypted portion of the transaction. When the receiver wants to spend, it creates a transaction input referencing the transaction output containing S1 and provides the S2 to prove that he is allowed to spend that transaction. When the block is created the provided S2 in the input is SHA256+RIPEMD and should match S1 of the reference output, if it matches, the transaction is processed.
By using secrets, and passing them between the sender and receiver in this encrypted manner, the addresses of the 2 parties making the transactions is never required or known outside of those 2 parties performing the transaction, thus, the system is anonymous and secure.
We are currently writing the whitepaper and a lot of other documentation now that we are close to a V1 (read 4-6 weeks) and all the technical aspects are functional and beta-tested.