> Have we officially abandoned the original goal of privacy/anonymity with bitcoin? Privacy isn't only a good thing when you have something to hide.
But if you have something to hide and the official on ramps and off ramps don't allow you to hide it, you can just use the black market, so the only people using the official system in that context are the people who believe themselves to be uninteresting to the government. Which naturally excludes nearly all the people the government is legitimately interested in, making the KYC requirements a pointless burden on innocent people.
> On and off ramps are generally meant to only include the legal avenues for buying and selling bitcoin. The government can absolutely regulate those, the black market is a separate concept.
Generally speaking government regulations only work when at least one of the buyer or seller wants the regulations, e.g. you buy your medication from the pharmacy and not a drug dealer because you want the quality controls the government imposes, even if the seller would rather not. So the openly operated pharmacy outcompetes the black market for aspirin.
When both the buyer and the seller have no interest in the rules, neither of them reports the other for violating them and then they're basically unenforceable. Which is hot garbage, because the costs of the rules still fall on the people they weren't meant to constrain, and the vig on the transactions funds other black market activities, and the inability of the parties to resolve disputes through the legal system begets violence etc.