What interests me is that so many people discuss the same thing and still seem to come away with entirely different takes.
You can be anonymous if you deal with BTC exclusively just as though you would with cash. But, and this is a very big but: if you use the same addresses repeatedly or if the addresses that you use can be linked and your identity can be tied to one of the addresses then all of your linked transactions are now no longer anonymous.
So you're anonymous right up to the point that you aren't, and then it works retroactively on anything that can be tied to that same identity.
Cash doesn't really have that property, and is therefore more anonymous than BTC, anonymity is in principle a boolean but there appear to be grades of anonymity when you start looking at it more closely. Anonymity as in 'the state of knowledge about an individual' vs 'anonymity, the level of anonymity that an individual can expect as the use of a particular method of payment' are two different concepts that we lump together as though they are the same thing.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It's baked into the protocol. Every transaction is public, and authenticated and authorized via cryptography. But every transaction has a name attached... Just not a name immediately linked to the human being responsible for executing the transaction.
Once that link is made, the blockchain becomes a towering monument to all that name's sins.
Contrast with a chan site, where the default configuration is that every post has a unique identifier independent from any posts previously made by an author. Depending on what data the administrator is collecting, those posts may be reversible to a human being, but tugging on one piece of the thread does not unravel the tapestry because a person's posts aren't tied to each other by default.
(HN is pseudonymous too. I post under a handle. I prefer not to link this handle to my public name. It would not take much effort to do so, and once somebody did, every comment I've ever made is immediately searchable).
You can be anonymous if you deal with BTC exclusively just as though you would with cash. But, and this is a very big but: if you use the same addresses repeatedly or if the addresses that you use can be linked and your identity can be tied to one of the addresses then all of your linked transactions are now no longer anonymous.
So you're anonymous right up to the point that you aren't, and then it works retroactively on anything that can be tied to that same identity.
Cash doesn't really have that property, and is therefore more anonymous than BTC, anonymity is in principle a boolean but there appear to be grades of anonymity when you start looking at it more closely. Anonymity as in 'the state of knowledge about an individual' vs 'anonymity, the level of anonymity that an individual can expect as the use of a particular method of payment' are two different concepts that we lump together as though they are the same thing.