I'm sure various governments are already "all over" bitcoin forensics, they just don't tell us 

Wow they show a wallet with $6m in BTC held by the CryptoLocker ransomware group.

That's not a  bad haul considering ....... and it could well be worth a lot more this time next year presuming the FBI doesn't seize it somehow.

Mixers. Coin Join. Shared wallets.

Eventually, you need proof. "Likely" and "probably" won't cut it. "In the same transaction" is also not proof since it can be proven that different addresses from different owners can sign the same transaction (which is what Coin Join is supposed to be doing.)

the linking can definitely get tenuous, per your comments.

in most cases, someone is going to make a mistake and at least one of those links is going to be legitimate. being able to filter out the legit linkings from the coincidental ones seems like a tough problem.

What steps can be taken with BTC and future currencies to stay one step ahead and protect anonymity?

Crypto only exchanges don't ask for your info. Exchanges that do fiat only need your info if you plan to do fiat deposits or withdrawals. Most crypto casinos also don't ask for any info.

At the risk of losing your coins, you can figure out a simple strategy to mix your coins by going through those.

Or mine your own coins. All mined coins are clean.

You can just model mined coins having coinbase + fee transactions as inputs, they are as traceable as anything else. If you want to launder coins by paying them to yourself as fees, this will NOT work.

Pirateat40s "GPUMAX"(was it called like that? Anyways, you could buy mining power at pools on the spot for BTC) scheme however seems to have been in quite some demand, and people paid a premium in BTC over mining costs.

"Information from trades" might also mean that someone doing a deposit of 10 BTC at an exchange can NOT do a sell transaction that sold 20 BTC. On the other hand the fiat part of exchanges is not as easily auditable, also exchanges rarely even report if their ticks are from sells or buys.

It looks like a quite interesting concept though, similar to what I had in mind even. As nobody here seems to be too eager to actually work on things that would bring Bitcoin forward (blockchain analysis for example) and rather either cirklejerks about prices in USD or wants to keep the illusion up that mixers even work (even CoinJoin depends upon the fact that YOU don't screw up at any point in time later AND that at least one other person you mixed with does never screw up - also you'll probably only be able to do very few transactions after mixing) I moved on to other fields...

Yes, that's the bottom line. It's a very much needed double-edged sword.

That's why I post this. I found it rather strange that it wasn't even mentioned here.

There other should be more of this one and bluemeanie1's; in the open source space.

Every day I get more of a feeling a lot is being done on the private side, outside of the public eye.