It is no surprise that anonymity has been leaving bitcoin. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as it used to be.
Monero the more anonymous bitcoin has been getting a lot of news as it is being used for many illegal purposes such as drugs and money laundering.
South Korea today, however, is increasing regulation on all cryptocurrency exchanges as reported by
https://revoltmedia.org/south-korean-new-rules-on-cryptocurrency/.
South Korean laws passed this morning are now only letting South Korean exchanges accept users if the user has real-name bank accounts connected.
Regulations like this are the first of many soon to come that will try to take anonymity from cryptocurrency.
The South Korean government reasoning was to prevent money laundering and other illegal activities.
There is nothing leaving Bitcoin.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdfThe traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the
parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly
precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in
another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending
an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone.
Satoshi knew from the start that the coin will not be fully anonymous.
And that new rule from the SK central bank is not a game changer.
They are just linking your trading account to your bank account, mostly because from what I read one of the reasons was that there were a lot of traders sending money to different bank accounts with different names on them.
The new AML laws will not affect your privacy more than they did now.
You used your bank account just the same as before, they already knew that about you.
And when you buy the
BTC, you can mix them using a service like Chipmixer and nobody will know which of the 16 million coins out there are yours.
A real change would be to make a requirement that all
BTC users must tell the financial observers what are their addresses, to force them to use only those and to declare at the end of the year all the tx you have made and their purpose. But that would mean the end of crypto in the country that adopts this.