KYC and AML are necessary. Bank secrecy enables corruption.
I don't understand how we can have a Bitcoin community which supports the goal of Wikileaks on one hand but on the other hand wants to have completely anonymous money.
You cannot have both. If you want to fight institutional corruption you have to follow the money. If you want anonymous money then you have to accept institutional corruption as the end result.
If there are bad actors then those bad actors should be investigated. That does not mean we should all be forced to get digital ID cards to access our money. A digital signature ought to be enough to prove your identity. There is no reason to have a centralized database.
It could work just fine if the digital signature could be somehow be connected to the Bitcoin blockchain itself.
What if for instance I want to validate that my coins are owned by me and that I'm trusted? I should be able to have a pseudo-anonymous trusted wallet. That wallet should attach my digital signature which is unique to me. It should connect my real world identity to my pseudo-nym without a loss of pseudo-anonymity or privacy.
Having a database with names attached to wallet addresses is absolutely not the way to do it. Having a database of digital signatures with public keys is a way to do it. If you email the owner of the wallet then you can communicate with them to ask them their real world identity in a private way.
I believe Keyhotee might actually solve the issue. It allows for verified trusted accounts. It does not seem to require all the centralization, but it doesn't prevent KYC either from my understanding of it. You can attach your pseudo identity to your real identity. So if you have to access a certain site and be verified it might be possible to do it without having to give out your real name to that site. You would give a public key to that site instead and it would know if your public key is on the whitelist or blacklist. That would be a way of doing it.
The philosophical debate is whether or not it should be done? I think if Bitcoins are going to be worth $100,000 each it will have to be done. At that point the richest people in the world will be large holders of Bitcoins. So all the bribery and other corruption will become a problem at some point and if democracy is to continue to exist then you cannot have anonymous money flowing around by the billions or trillions.