In a world of bitcoin any address could be anyone, but as addresses are shared (or posted on someones public website) knowledge is revealed about who they are. You can, thanks to how bitcoin works, track all the transactions they do and who they send it to. You may know somehow who the other side of the transactions are (or find out in the future, since the blockchain is forever).
This isn't how cash works, which is the real "money" in our system. At some point (even if on credit) cash is transferred for stuff. I don't want people to know which places I have a news subscription for. I don't want them to know who I donate to just from the blockchain. I have a choice to want them to know that. This is a practical problem because that means either I need to use shady services to hide these facts for normal purposes. That, or never use them except in a few cases where I don't care people know (but I also might regret that).
I think from a practical perspective, this makes bitcoin really hard to use. How do you make transactions that aren't easily traced to you by literally anyone? Answer: it's hard and possibly won't work completely.
This isn't how cash works, which is the real "money" in our system. At some point (even if on credit) cash is transferred for stuff. I don't want people to know which places I have a news subscription for. I don't want them to know who I donate to just from the blockchain. I have a choice to want them to know that. This is a practical problem because that means either I need to use shady services to hide these facts for normal purposes. That, or never use them except in a few cases where I don't care people know (but I also might regret that).
I think from a practical perspective, this makes bitcoin really hard to use. How do you make transactions that aren't easily traced to you by literally anyone? Answer: it's hard and possibly won't work completely.