We're working now to add better privacy features, like mandatory participation in anonymity sets, a proper I2P protocol for transaction submission to network nodes, and more elaborate methods of transferring funds that obfuscate transaction submission time to the network and transaction destinations.

Of course, if the NSA is sitting sniffing your personal packets off your network, there may not be a lot to help you at the current time. Other persons are working on some censorship free networks for the near future, and there are becoming better ways to enter the internet using physical cash. Privacy online is a difficult thing to achieve.

We're trying to model deanonymizing attack vectors on the network right now with some math grads, but at least mixin >= 1.

Whoever said that is either a complete idiot or a liar. Ethereum is a platform that can run autonomous corporations and even create other currencies on top of it. Monero is just a (quite nice) currency.

BCN is dead. XMR is the de facto standard for CryptoNote coins just by looking at BCN/XMR parings on Poloniex (similar to [YourCoinHere]/BTC)

lols, my thoughts exactly Mumbles...why not just claim you're a nigerian prince who enjoys trading alts?

As dga has already pointed out, you don't want to create a scenario where guilt-by-association exists. Monero's privacy is a feature, but it's not the only feature.

David's quote is misleading, he didn't mean that regulators can magically peer into the blockchain and trace transactions. He meant that in a situation where you run a charity, for instance, you would publish the viewkey along with some form of per-tx signature so regulators concerned with ensuring charities are run appropriately can peek into your books and see your accounts. Another use-case could be for a company to let its accountants, bookkeepers, and exco have visibility on the account and on the movement of funds. Or a married couple that want a shared account.

Monero is private by default, transparent optional. The choice of whether privacy is relinquished for a particular wallet is the user's and the user's alone.

I'm glad to see this. Having options is better than having none

Actually it isn't, if you want a high degree of anonymity. The more transparent transactions you have, the more you undermine the anonymity of the non-transparent transactions.

That's not the way it works. The "reveal" does not reveal which transaction it is, it reveals that they were involved in a transaction (this we could deduce already) and the exact amount (ie. let's ignore spurious outputs change outputs), so it's not the same as revealing the one-time private key for a transaction. What we're talking about is a reveal that is no different to a screenshot of a person transacting (as has been posted in this thread) that contains full details of their transaction (destination address, amount, mixin count, payment ID). How exactly would you prevent that information from being revealed? You can't.

Monero is meant to solve that exact problem - what happens if we know the address of the recipient? Can we do anything with it? It's a stealth address, so good luck getting anything out of that. Ring signatures are an additional layer on top of that, and they exist to protect you when a transaction is compromised. They're a level of ambiguity, not a level of anonymity. Privacy is accorded by the stealth addresses, ambiguity gives you plausible deniability in the event that someone else in in the signature group for a particular input is compromised.

Edit: just to add, this stuff is inherent in the protocol. We're not suggesting changes, we're telling you what is already there. Reading the whitepaper is probably a good starting point to understanding why this exists in the protocol:)

In fact, they could even reveal their private key on live TV if they wanted - as has happened with Bitcoin before:)

To your second question: the general consensus is that it has a relatively small effect. Here's a dump from a short discussion that was on IRC about the matter the other day:

smooth:    it is similar to a sybil attack
smooth:    let's say a lot of people post their information publically, that is the same to an observer as the observer launching a sybil attack with all those third parties as owned identities

There are solutions we are theorising at present that will reduce the effect of this, but please understand this is such an edge-case that we're taking about protection from an extremely sophisticated attacker with extremely large access to resources. Even in its current form with no edge-cases ruled out, Monero has a level of privacy heretofore unknown to "ordinary" persons who use Bitcoin. Sure, accessibility is an issue, and that is a long-term goal, but don't forget that Monero has an interesting value-proposition already.

We will close the final gates and reduce risks to privacy as time progresses; we do not have to solve everything now. Our dedication and commitment to doing so transcends price fluctuations, FUD from those unfamiliar with the matter, or snide remarks on social networks. Let's not try solve every apparent problem now, but let's work towards solving these as a group and as a community:)