I know there are privacy coins, but the overall trend is towards KYC - including on exchanges, and this will doubtless increase as mainstream adoption draws closer and governments become more hands-on in devising legislation.
I don't see any tinfoil hat on you, my man. As to the above quote, I agree and currently I'm not using any exchange that requires KYC (I have used Coinbase and Circle in the past). I'm not so much concerned about the data an exchange can collect from me, but I'd like to keep my crypto dealings a wee bit private if possible--but FB and Google? Oh hell no. I don't use FB and I stopped using google as a search engine, though I can't say I've stopped using all of their services.
Those two companies are like big brother from George Orwell's 1984, and both of them freak me out. I don't know how successful FB's crypto will be, but it might spark some interest in
real cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But we'll see. I don't know much about what they're planning and how their coin is going to be implemented--and I'm not very interested in the details either. Fuck Facebook, that's my general opinion about them.
KYC is the reason that cryptocurrency won't have that kind of free hand it was meant for. Then government being incorporated in for legislation won't really make headway. This is one issue that crypto will have to face in the future when governments start coming into the regulation.
I don't know what you meant by the bolded sentence above, but I think governments are going to start regulating crypto. They already have, in fact, in the form of those KYC requirements and so forth. They won't be able to destroy it, but governments have more power over it than most people realize. They have a bazooka in their pocket that they just haven't fired yet.