That many things these days are called Blockchain, as if to appear secure, but they're no more sophisticated than centralised databases, while actual blockchains, like Bitcoin as exemplified in its whitepaper, is designed to be a secure and decentralised chain of transactions.

"Blockchain" has stopped meaning anything when people decided to use it for anything remotely related to internet money. It's just become a fancy word executives put on investor decks to woo venture capitalists.

But it doesn't mean that the actual cryptographic technology called blockchain, i.e. a chain of digitally signed transactions with a distributed consensus mechanism, is itself insecure.

Bitcoin is traceable due to its very implementation. Unless you know how to use it properly, it's very easy to deanonymize yourself on accident. And once that happens, all the transactions thereafter are easy to follow.

Monero, on the other hand, is designed to intentionally be hard to trace history of transactions on.

Yes, I edited it out from my comment because I knew someone would point that out and I didn't really want to go on a tangent about it. I meant it's untraceable by some very narrow definitions of tracing.

You'd know that hex address X sent money to Y, but you wouldn't necessarily know that X is John Doe that lives at 1234 Main St., nor you'd be able to tell that, knowing address X, John Doe also owns address Z.

With KYC laws you have a lot more metadata to be able to do correlations like that, but I'm specifically talking about the protocol and the technology itself.

It's important though to mention that you don't need KYC to attach a real identity to a bitcoin wallet. It's harder to do at scale, but if you're interested in finding the bitcoin wallet(s) of a specific person, or the person behind a specific wallet, this can be done with analysis of the blockchain itself and information from other parties to their transactions (which include their ISP, the ISP of some Bitcoin nodes where they advertised their transactions, and the seller sending them physical goods if they are using BTC for that). Also, if a BTC wallet is linked to a physical identity at any time, all past transactions of that physical identity can generally be discovered, often even if they are using separate wallets.

Something about No True Scotsman if I'm understanding correctly.

Don't use AML/KYC entities?

I can't use crypto for anything useful without it. This advice means crypto is useless.

not entirely correct; if you both earn and spend all of your crypto directly as cryptocurrency, then you can fairly easily just remain entirely anonymous. This just doesn't apply to most people, at least most who do legal business.

For me and the vast majority of people that is a complete non-starter. And the primary value of a currenyc is that it gives you liquidity to participate in the economy. Until crypto can claim the same thing it only barely qualifies as a currency in my mind.

What about when it comes to paying taxes on those earnings?

Gains can be reported to the IRS without revealing their source.

Sounds like a recipe for an audit, at least once they can clear their backlog. At which point, I'm pretty certain they're going to want to know more than "generic cap gains sale"/"revenue paid to me in cryptocurrency". They pretty clearly do not want anonymity in the flow of money.

If you spend it to KYC wallets (a company providing Internet hosting, for example), you won't be hard to deanonymize as well.

Is localbitcoin not still a thing?

He is big brained.