If you use local wallets like Electrum, transact via Tor, mix thoroughly, and generally practice good OPSEC, your personas and their cryptocurrency can be as anonymous as you like. But only as long as you maintain compartmentalization from meatspace.
The more that people use bitcoin, the more useful it gets and the harder it is to stop.
How? There is no globally public record of all cash transactions, unlike with Bitcoin.
Worse it's not just the government that can track bitcoins. I can easily see a gang keeping an eye on transactions looking for people with large accounts so they can use physical means of persuasion to liberate it.
Once you get to the coffee shop stage, nobody knows where that money came from.
And you don't need to be 100% certain, it's enough to get a pool of suspects which then you can analyze/surveil with other methods.
That's the whole point. Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering is all about preventing anonymous online transactions where real world goods are bought.
So ultimately, how are you going to buy them? Send a homeless guy in to be on camera?
You have your cold storage where most of your money is, and you have new wallets for the purpose of hold your X thousand dollars of general spending money.
In the same way that a coffee shop can notice that you have physical dollars bills in your wallet that you just pulled out to pay from.
If your coins were mixed (or transferred through monero and back again, or whatever), it can't be tracked where the money came from.
And this isn't even getting into the really interesting stuff that is coming down the pipeline, such at decentralized exchanges.
The governments have the most leverage over exchanges and whoever "cashes out" Starbucks. If they tell them to stop taking coins that have been through a mixer then what are you going to do? China for example recently banned all exchanges period.
We need the majority coins to go through mixers same we need more people to use TLS / Tor / whatever for there to be any strength in numbers. And even then, Russia and China can do practically whatever the government wants:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/v...
But they aren't doing THAT.
Blacklisting certain addresses is arguably 'harder' for the government to do than a simple straight up ban.
Blacklisting address is difficult, as the coins can quickly and easily be transferred to an unexpecting, innocent party. And now all of a sudden ALL coins are tainted.
What, is the average person going to track which coins are on the secret government blacklist and which aren't? If they don't do that then their coins are at risk of being tainted, and now THEY are on the ever expanding blacklist as well.
The government has only 1 option, a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies. Anything else is just this impossible game of wakamole that will hurt innocents way more than the bad guys.
If they don't do the blanket ban, then the cat is out of the bag.
And then all payment processors / miners / etc. in a jurisdiction must respect that list.
And everyone else would do well to check the lists because their payment might become not accepted down the line.
But it's funny for someone on HN to be characterizing what I mentioned as "niche market". I mean, what more than capital, servers and consultants does one need for a startup?