The 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.
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As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner
Only if I publish my address and leave patterns behind. Agree that it's debatable then again, wouldn't you agree that in a relative sense, pseudo-anonymous is better than bank accounts tied to your name?
It depends. Pseudo-anonymity can give a (possibly false) sense of security. With bank accounts tied to your name, at least you definitely know that "they" can trace it back to you at every time, whereas with pseudo-anonymity you might never know if you're fully anonymous.
Good point there. Pseudo-anonymity (or should I say, pseudonym-based) is the first step towards better privacy and decentralised transactions, not the solution. Still, we have the means to do so, if we really want to. With bank accounts, everything traces back to you by default without much improvement to be done. Different systems, different purposes.