Your argument is not the 'gotcha' you think it is. Those transactions are public record. The money has to get into the mixer somehow, and it has to come out somehow. Unless your coins never exit the system or interact with a daemon you operate or that can be tied to you, sure you enjoy a modicum of pseudonimity, but the moment you interact with that account you've given that up. Whether this is SPV, light wallet, custodial wallet or home grown daemon wallet, you must make a connection to a daemon and it must gather peers and chain-data.
Even if you mine the coins, you have to broadcast a TX to solve the block, collect reward and propagate new coins. Same with proof of stake. New coins must be minted and rewarded, something must solve to mint.
One of the most common ways 'private' transactions are traced is through daemon broadcast. The first daemon to broadcast/relay a transaction holds tangible log info to nail users. After that broadcast you now have 8-16 other daemons who've seen and recorded that peer broadcast in their logs, then they reach out to update the swarm. You don't need to operate many nodes to get very targeted info on the originator of a transaction, you only need what's called 'peer diversity'. TOR does very little to negate this, especially when 'light-transactions' are used, where only the transactions lacked during sync are requested- this is a passive 'fingerprint' of a given daemon and its sync-state. Often 'light transactions' are lauded as a performance mechanism but unfortunately anything that decreases traffic homogeneity will have an influence on a bad actor's ability to isolate a given user's traffic.
Anybody can run these daemons. You don't need sophisticated surveillance infrastructure for this, it's being done today by hackers and agencies alike to target users of actually-private cryptoassets that have inherently private blockchains.
I mean, it’s strictly true that you can always screw up or miss out on a critical step in any task, but your line of reasoning is basically declaring that masks won’t ever hide your face. It’s far too absolute and pedantic.
I was expecting something like this comment with maybe some extra working out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32924389
