Monero doesn't help if the FBI manages to get a copy of your DB with trade histories etc. With BTC-e being hosted on unencrypted servers in Germany, it's hard to believe they wouldn't have been able to get it.
What scenario are you describing exactly? What exact problem are you trying to thwart?
A server containing a user's trade histories would show amounts deposited with Monero. But it would not contain the addresses those deposits came from, the Monero daemon doesn't know this.
Similarly, the user's withdrawals wouldn't be to an actual address that they could cross reference. RingCT gives people one time use addresses. But even if you were somehow not using RingCT addresses the Monero user experience had a best practice. Since you cannot follow transactions to that address over the blockchain, you cannot guarantee that it was the real destination at all. Any user should just have two wallets and transfer to one, which would have the address in the exchange's database, and then in wallet B, transfer to wallet C. I believe RingCT removes that marginal inconvenience, as the addresses themselves are one-time (but feel free to correct me here).
The crux of the BTC-E event seems to be from blockchain analysis, given the information we have. In which case Monero would have stopped this investigation.
In general though, the currency has nothing to do with the exchange's problems? I'm not really sure what you are imagining. Decentralized solutions like EtherDelta and upcoming cross chain solutions are going to be accelerated by this culling.
>The crux of the BTC-E event seems to be from blockchain analysis, given the information we have. In which case Monero would have stopped this investigation.
You're wrong.
shuf btc-e.sql|head -n 100|sprunge
Using input from a pipe or STDIN redirection...
http://sprunge.us/JNIP
>In general though, the currency has nothing to do with the exchange's problems?
A server containing a user's trade histories would show amounts deposited with Monero. But it would not contain the addresses those deposits came from, the Monero daemon doesn't know this.
Similarly, the user's withdrawals wouldn't be to an actual address that they could cross reference. RingCT gives people one time use addresses. But even if you were somehow not using RingCT addresses the Monero user experience had a best practice. Since you cannot follow transactions to that address over the blockchain, you cannot guarantee that it was the real destination at all. Any user should just have two wallets and transfer to one, which would have the address in the exchange's database, and then in wallet B, transfer to wallet C. I believe RingCT removes that marginal inconvenience, as the addresses themselves are one-time (but feel free to correct me here).