To be honest, I didn't know that this was the exact story behind Shadowcash, but regardless of what happened and how, I wanted to point out that this is serious stuff. In order to apply this stuff properly, good cryptographers are needed, and not just some good coders.

I totally agree with everything you mentioned. My point is that if you wanna add a gimmick to BitShares, just do it with gimmicks that already exist... Are we going to add ring signatures and stealth addresses to BitShares? Hell no...

Even some people within Dash know that Darksend isn't 100% secure and private. It is a new technology and you never know when someone will be able to break into it. Imagine thinking that you are anonymous and then one day waking up, 5 years later and you realize that all your transactions have been denonymized. Not all people need temporary privacy or anonymity. This is serious stuff where lives might be in danger after such 'revelations'. It isn't just investors trying to hide money like it probably will be in BitShares. Again, there is little privacy, privacy and total privacy-anonymity. If I had to chose the first one, I'd rather not have it at all.

Also at the moment they offer no good obfuscation of IP and many people, including myself, were complaining about this. Mixing was taking hours first and then they added people who get paid to offer liquidity. What are the problems with this :

Let's say CoinJoin offers quite good privacy. There are the following problems :

1. Only the destinations are mixed up, not the amounts. So someone can track back who sent what with some good analysis.
2. By not protecting your IP, especially when your mixes take hours, someone could easily find out who you are.
3. We don't know how many Masternodes are not compromised/control/owned by adversaries. It is currently assumed that only a small portions of the nodes is malicious.
4. When people offer just liquidity, an attacker can easily see who they are as their funds are probably going from CoinJoin to CoinJoin, while the rest of the participants might spend their coins somewhere.

CoinJoin and Stealth addresses would be pretty good, at least a lot better than CoinJoin itself. But again even these are not enough. If you can't hide the fact that you are using Monero, Dash etc, then there is little chance of being able to stay anonymous.