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Agreed - privacy of transaction is the #1 issue blockchain potentially solves.

I don't get it... aren't all transactions completely public on the blockchain? Isn't that the fundamental way it works? (Mixing services notwithstanding.)

Sure, your wallet isn't necessarily traceable to your identity, but the whole transaction history of your wallet is there, and if you ever convert those bitcoins to real cash, you're going to need to divulge that identity to someone.

"Shielded" transactions on networks such as Zerocash are private. There's an increasing trend in this direction as "zero knowledge" layer 2 networks come online, since they have the same underlying mechanisms which makes private transfers easy to implement (or to even have as the default).

And Monero is the only widely used coin that actually does this, the rest make things even less private because all transactions are publicly available on the blockchain.

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