Note: this was a genuine question, with genuine interest in the answer. Why the downvotes?

Seems a fair question. In a private banking context, it would potentially eliminate the need to pay escrow fees to a third party, without resorting to massively inefficient public ledgers. In the context of e.g. stock trading, it might mean that a traditional bank can connect buyers and sellers over a peer to peer connection and guarantee that their trades execute in order without even needing a centralized book. That's maybe a slightly extreme take, and probably a ways off. But I think anonymity is the least important of what becomes available if you can trust client-side processing.

its basically a thought experiment.

one of the things i never understood about bitcoin was the idea of the public ledger. one of the main things about most people and businesses in general is that they do not want to draw attention to their actual flows of money. the idea everyone would want their entire purchase and payment history "out there" in public never made sense to me.

but if you could actually make bitcoin anonymous, then what would happen? would it be adopted more? or would the government actually have to crack down?