I think your analysis cuts wood. However, you didn't cover the IRL related to the operation of PoW protocols.
Discussion
I don’t understand your question. IRL = in real life, right?
Yes
What I mean is that in real life the operation of protocols -and especially PoW, because of heavy infrastructural requirements- entails a whole lot of practical issues and complexities that inevitably impact anonymity. It would be interesting to hear your comparison between monero and zcash from this perspective.
I’m usually only concerned with user privacy and not miner privacy. For user privacy the infrastructure requirements don’t matter.
Monero’s PoW algorithm is deliberately hard to accelerate on ASIC/FPGA. Zcash’s PoW algorithm was designed to be GPU-friendly, but is now mainly mined on ASICs.
So currently for miner anonymity Monero has the lead.
However, Zcash is planning to move to a hybrid PoW/PoS algorithm and that might change the situation.
Are you concerned with miner privacy?
Thanks for this interesting answer. Yes, minerside privacy is concerning. If I were looking for transaction records, miners would be the first I would pressure. But I am not an it person.
The miners don’t have additional information compared to the data in the blockchain. The only information a miner could possibly gain is where a transaction originated, but that can be obfuscated with Tor or a mixnet like Nym.