What you might be missing though is the optional visibility of the monero blockchain, right? I'd be interested in your take on this with that in mind.
I like the idea of the "viewkey" from the perspective of personal privacy. But a financial system has 2 aspects:
[1] - disegregated private facing one.
[2] - an aggregated, public facing one that provides integrity and accountability
The viewkey opens a "peekhole" on a granular level for one person, but for it to have any value it has to be part of a greater whole who's existence is open and accountable. It has to have confidence and integrity which comes from demonstrating that it squares with the sum of its parts. The public aspect of any financial system is huge. Companies report balances, nations declare and spend budgets, wages are paid etc. (We can check Target2 to see how much money everyone owes the Germans
)
In the fiat money system, accountability is managed for us by the counterparty network known as the banking system plus armies of auditors who check that totals equal the sum of their parts. Without that aspect of it you's have no confidence and no value - you'd just have a very private account in an invisible, dead network.
What Satoshi did was to remove the counterparty layer and put the whole thing in public hands, thereby putting "us" in the role of auditors. That public, transparent aspect of the blockhain is absolutely a core principle that underpins its security, integrity and therefore value. In this model, privacy is replaced with anonymity.
I've got no objection to innovation and pursuing new ways to enhance personal privacy in crypto. But what Dash is attempting to do is an optimal approach - i.e. greatly enhance Bitcoin's anonymity without compromising the public ledger. That is an admirable objective that's difficult to acheive. Because it's difficult to achieve, it's easy to shoot holes in it over all kinds of low level technical implementation issues, but hey, what technology in the history of the internet wasn't like that. Http was leaky as a sieve. Add an "s" and it's unbreakable.
Likeways, the Cryptonote tech and persuit of totally "invisible" money is an admirable pursuit. But sell it for what it is not what it isn't. The material difference isn't nuances of cryptology but rather the priority you give to having a public ledger or not.
The contradiction that keeps hitting me in the face with Cryptonote is this: It's "selling point" is ultra security and ultra privacy, whereas for me the one thing that Bitcoin brought as that supports integrity and security far more than any algo is public visibility.
IMO, if I wanted to corrupt a cryptocurrency, what are the two strategies I'd employ ?
[1] - remove the public ledger from view
[2] - give myself a backdoor to the encryption algo
I've never been a proponent of the second of those conspiracy theories because I generally think that if both the research papers and the code are in the public domain then it's fair game for public use and can be sufficiently scrutinised. But the first of those two - if that goes then no algo is going to secure the system IMO.
