Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

Blockchains are anonymous, not untraceable. Except Monero, which is both.

Lots of comments here guffawing at the lack of revelation, but anonymity is central to blockchain-related popular understanding (and endless crypto pr).

> A critical weakness of crypto is that the actors involved are less trustworthy than government.

If anything, "crypto" is based on the idea that people can't be trusted, and is thus a trustless system, based on an agreed upon protocol with cryptographic controls. It isn't meant as an improvement to an existing system, but as an alternative system, and while we often hear of people who say it is a scam, that it won't work, that it can't work, the unbiased reality is that it is being used for value transactions and has been non-stop for over a decade now.

The phrase "a general consensus on the value of crypto" is equal to "a general consensus on the value of money". Crypto (as in cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets, and, in general, blockchain based digital ledgers) is a vast subject. Nothing stops someone from creating their own paper currency or non-blockchain digital currency (Nectar points, air miles).

There are for sure questions to be asked here about how unregulated, crowd managed currencies can be integrated into existing societies were money is heavily regulated, but that is another subject.

> The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.

> Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

- Satoshi

The reality is that Satoshi envisioned bitcoin very differently from how things are currently implemented. They envisioned public keys being rotated, single use addresses, etc.

The current systems don't provide any of the privacy that the original paper sought.

> It is high time for blockchain enthusiasts to ask this question: Have the primary principals underlying bitcoin’s design — privacy, fraud proof, non-inflationary— been completely destroyed by today’s blockchain operators?

You can pick apart this Medium post if you'd like but I think it's really an excellent question. Read the original paper and ask yourself if what we're seeing in the market is really the "Satoshi vision".

Pseudonymous, usually. You tend to have a 1:n mapping of wallet addresses to transactions. Unless you use Monero, which is anonymous.