[xaitv]

Besides the payment processor I use allowing these things afaik(but that might be an EU vs USA thing): isn't the point of blockchain that everything is immutable and a full history of every transaction is kept? That means that if your wallet(or w/e you use to pay) is ever connected to you as a person, everyone will know what "morally questionable or financially risky" things you did in the past, which unless you don't care about that will still cause you to be really careful using your money on these type of things(honestly: even more careful than right now probably).

You could be careful to not leak your wallet address of course, but if we'd truly be a cashless society without decentralized currency you'd want to buy your groceries with it too, or order computer parts. What prevents these shops you buy from from having a security issue and leaking your wallet address? You could have a separate wallet per shop, but you need to get money into it somehow which can be traced as well(because it's the blockchain).

Note: I'm not an expert on blockchain/crypto, there might be ways to mitigate this, I'm just legit curious as to how this would be solved in a world like this.

[sowbug]

I have two answers, one snarky.

Answer #1: relax, they already know everything about you. With every interaction in society, you leave some combination of name, email, address, purchase history, security-camera footage, license-plate footage, IP address, cell-tower history, credit-card number, Venmo likes, etc. The history of a unit of digital currency certainly helps fill in gaps. But whoever "they" are to you, they already know.

Answer #2: No single tool is a one-size-fits-all answer to privacy. TCP/IP needs TLS for transport-layer privacy, DNSSEC and TLS certs for authenticity, VPNs and Tor for protection against traffic analysis, throwaway accounts to segregate one's personal workstreams, and so on. The privacy of the internet results from an ever-evolving collection of tools.

Bitcoin is TCP/IP for money. It's a pipe that allows transfer of value from one place to another -- that's it. It doesn't provide anonymity, but unlike centralized payment-processing systems, it allows the creation of tools on top of it that could provide a practical level of anonymity. A Bitcoin mixer, for example, is comparable to a VPN.

Note that if VPNs or TLS were invented today, rather than decades ago, the Hive Mind would be demonizing them as tools for criminals and/or the kind of person none of us admits to being (purchasers of porn, etc.). We take a lot of internet privacy tools for granted, mostly because we're accustomed to them, but also because they were grandfathered before September 2001.