I think that the timing issues are related to the problems with mixnets for anonymity: it turns out a global passive adversary can observe all messages sent and

I think that the timing issues are related to the problems with mixnets for anonymity: it turns out a global passive adversary can observe all messages sent and received and eventually determine which parties are talking to one another, within certain probability bounds. It sounds like a similar issue is at play with cryptocurrency. The solution with anonymity is to send cover & real messages through the network in such a way that traffic analysis fails. One approach would be to saturate a network link, sending random cover data until there's real data to send, then returning to cover data. There are more bandwidth-friendly schemes as well. Might a similar scheme for cryptocurrency be to constantly (or stochastically, based on some probability distribution) send money to one's own other addresses? Obviously there's an issue with transfer fees, but maybe this could be a tunable, based on how important your privacy is.