I'm not writing this as FUD or pointless rant, I'm a developer and have some free time, and would really like to hear any ideas on how can we mitigate this probable future..
Pretty simple answer - if you want privacy and anonymity, don't use coinbase. Quite honestly, coinbase & Tor aren't really compatible since the former requires full KYC information from customers buying or selling BTC.
Will anonymous coin transactions become illegal? Under certain conditions in certain countries, almost definitely. However, like leaks in a dam, capital flows find the cracks. Short term, there's no way that authorities will shut down all of the crypto to crypto exchanges, especially considering that many are hosted in places where authorities don't consider crypto-tokens money or even property and thusly don't regulate it.
Longer term, crypto to crypto decentralized exchanges will be needed as will cash fiat to crypto exchanges - that will eliminate the ability for authorities to stop flows. They can still do standard policing, but we've seen how well that works to stop protocols like BitTorrent.
Decentralization is the answer.
I started looking at crypto to crypto decentralized exchanges, and didn't find much.. the only thing I found is NXT multigateway, which calls itself decentralized, but as far as I understand actually relies on centralized servers (hosted on AWS..). Is this correct? or did they actually solve the problem? Anyone is aware of a serious effort to solve this?