In its present form it won't really scale much better or worse than bitcoin. The constant factor of increased size won't really matter.

That all blockchain based coins have scaling issues is a better argument.

It's rather silly to make claims about what Monero will be in the future.  It is what it is today.  Tomorrow, it will be what participants cause it to become in the intervening time. There are no insoluble problems of significance on the horizon.  There are numerous very soluble problems, which need work.

For example, naive timing analysis is a pretty easily solvable problem, technically.  Claiming that those solutions will not be applied in a suitable time-frame is just nattering negative nabobery.  It is quite suitable and appropriate to solve that problem after the mix-net is working. In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order.  If you try to get ahead of that order, you might get a speeding ticket from God.

For every measure, there is a counter-measure.  When the cost of measure and counter-measure is consistently and overwhelmingly asymmetric, a nimble defender can hold much ground.  That's sort of fundamental to most crypto.  I see no reason to believe that Monero cannot be evolved into a state of sufficient privacy to make it infeasible for any real entity to defeat its functions at at level which makes it unusable for a substantial minority of actual candidate users.  Monero can take advantage of numerous force multipliers, and hold much ground, despite its present diminutive stature.  As its stature grows, it will be able to hold more yet.

Everything will always be vulnerable, because you can't even know the rules of the game.  The laws of physics are not at all certain or clear, except in statistical terms.  Thus every real system, implemented in physical reality, has some unknown, unknowable, potential to violate your assumptions.  Chasing after a perfect system is a complete and utter snark hunt.  It's good math, but bad engineering.  Systems are only ever either good enough or not good enough, for any well-defined purpose and criterion of evaluation.  Pretending that illusory criteria are normative is either Bad Faith or folly.

TL;DR:  Monero has deficiencies.  They are being addressed by development.  If you want it to go faster, try submitting a pull request.  The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

"In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order." - aminorex

Dude. If you have a solution to blockchain scalability what on earth are you doing here arguing with us. Please go code out your solution. Please stop wasting your time on us. We aren’t worth it.

There is no the government  though. Yes the US is trying to make itself so, but the tide is firmly against it globally now.
The world is moving away from being unipolar, and a fair degree of this is in reaction to the over reach of the USA on the internet. It's not clear where this will take us in the next few years, but I don't think we can be justified in talking about "the government" taking the kind of control you talk about for certain.

Boogeyman A (imaginary) and Boogeyman B (real).  There is no omniscient omnipotent adversary.  We're safe from the omniscient omnipotent adversary.  There is a multi-headed, clever, highly-resourced enemy of the very human freedom and dignity which Monero offers to strengthen.  The degree of Monero's success will largely determine the degree to which it is attacked; however, increasing success will also increase the resources which can be employed in defense.  Monero has the initiative, and can choose the battlefield.  Absent suicidal decisions, it will be one advantageous to Monero.  But I do not think the outcome of such a contest is in any sense pre-determined.  Good execution will probably win the day, for one side or the other.  For the time being, Monero is probably far below the radar of threat assessment.  

It is certainly possible to use even bitcoin in an effectively anonymized fashion.  It is not easy enough to allow most potential victims of attacks which depend on privacy defects to use it in that way.  Monero is able to become several orders easier to use in an effectively anonymized fashion than bitcoin is ever likely to be.  The more progress that can be made, the better and more fit Monero will become to occupy that crucial dark liquidity niche.  Again, it just takes time, money, and hard work.

Even a fundamentally superior cryptographic protocol would require long implementation time, political and social project engineering, favorable project economics, network building, &c.  Monero is a long way down that road already. So far, in fact, that I am skeptical that any fundamentally superior competitor can displace it.  Theory means little without practical implementation.  Most of the attack surface of a system is in the details of its implementation, not the fundaments of its theory of operation, simply because the implementation is substantially more complex than the theory.

I'm much more concerned about the coherent vision of the developers than I am about the underlying protocol, the progress of the implementation, the growth of the economy, or even the integrity of the network:  Unless it is politically and socially possible to maintain important and well-defined goals for the system, there is little hope that the implementation will achieve those goals.  In my opinion it is centrally important that a defining dialog be on-going, in order to keep this loosely bound raft of driftwood headed in one direction.  The most vulnerable attack surface of all is the (even more complex) human mind.

"Anonymous" is pretty much a vacuous concept here. It gets thrown around a lot with respect to crypto coins, but the dictionary definition is just "not associated with a name" and that does indeed apply to bitcoin and not only every other coin but most pieces of software and systems on the internet in general.

That is one reason it is better to speak in more precise terms such as unlinkability and blockchain analysis resistance. I'm highly critical of much of what they do and how they do it but in this respect I give high praise to the people behind cryptonote. They recognize that to solve real problems you must first clearly define those problems.

and if that information gets leaked, from one single person you interact with, than all of your transaction history becomes discoverable. sure there is always an element of plausible deniablity, but tyrants dont give a crap about plausible deniability.

The socialism doesn't need to be omniscient. Fact is we can study history and see what happens every time. The masses ride the socialism all the way down until it comes after them too. Then war and chaos. Then reset.

Implementation is critical (damn don't I know that!), for without it then all the theory and talk is useless. And it is true that the coin with the best implementation will be able to cherry pick the best features from other coins, but only if some aspect of its inertia prevents it. I think without a holistic design early on, there is a risk for Monero either to fall into the inertia trap that Bitcoin fell into, or not reach critical mass. I will not try to quantify that risk, as I don't want to take a political position. I shared some technical analysis. I do desire the NSA-blinded coin (don't you?).

Design parameters can be important if they impact exponential differences in adoption rate, as that impacts the prior paragraph.

Integrating I2P or Tor with a coin isn't a bad thing, it can supplement any other anonymity added.

Good luck. We all are going to need it. The multi-headed monster called socialism is headed towards a 309 year confluence event. These are usually quite turbulent and bloody. Also we are shifting into a 309 year public wave cycle (alternates between public and private every 309 years), so the 15th century and the Hundred Years War, the 9th Century, the 3rd Century, or the widespread war leading into the formation of the Athenian Empire would be a better reference point.

Btw, just saw this Original NSA Whistle Blower: Goal is 'Total Population Control'.

wolf0, mixers are honeypots.