Obviously, ospec can still blow your cover. But Monero and other assets are certainly a game changer in this space.
The recent $4.5M ransom was evidence that this isn't really theoretical: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN24W25W
(Bitcoin can be converted to Monero, and the bitcoin can be mixed, so it's still quite hard to do what you're suggesting: to track down the perpetrators of large-scale crimes such as this. The flipside is that criminals' opsec tends to be very poor; good police work is usually enough to capture them.)
If the government was interested in your illegal transactions, they would find you, and they would take everything you own in recompense if they wished. Your 'anonymous' wallet will not save you if cryptocurrencies actually become important.
If you want to stop that, you need to consider what a revolution entails - civil disobedience and breaking unjust laws en masse and standing up to the state in the real world, not just in code.
I have some sympathy as I have the same approach to online identity (don't bother as anonymity simply isn't realistic), but if working for a company that recently had to flee US jurisdiction I'd be more circumspect about advocating breaking the law!
It's almost impossible to be anonymous to a nation state even if you try harder than us anyway, and most people slip up early and often - you won't know you want to hide from a state till it is too late in most cases.
Though given you are posting your thoughts on defying the state and avoiding taxes in detail under your real name here and probably elsewhere, I'm not sure dragnet surveillance would be required.
Still illegal in all jurisdictions though, and at any point in the future people with guns may come to seize your assets based on the very complete and pseudo-anonymous list of transactions, because creating money and taxing transactions is a right that governments jealously guard and will not easily give up.
I find currencies-as-code fascinating partly because of this strange mix of utopian thought and sincere attempts to overthrow global systems of governance (many of which are corrupt and self-serving) with code. People have been proclaiming they would upend the financial system and governments since 2008, but overthrowing systems of government requires physical acts of defiance and real loss, not just switching currency.
I disagree that cryptocurrencies are currently disrupting centuries of customs, simply because most transactions on them are fake and volume/value is far lower than claimed[0], but also because if they do become popular enough to matter for real transactions (not speculation on price), states can easily impose regulation, audits and taxes on them by taking them over and changing the rules. Developers or exchanges would easily be suborned for example, since the code makes the rules and the majority wins, the rules can be changed.
There are also good reasons that state currencies require auditing, rollback, identity verification and trusted third parties overseeing transactions - because without those you end up with a wild-west where bad actors can steal your money with impunity. For these reasons cryptocurrencies in their current form will never be very attractive to most people or corporations.
0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2019/07/02/the-anat...