Perhaps on a technical level it's easier to access the Bitcoin ledger than bank records but LE has far more experience with the later.
Also, if you solely receive and send bitcoin outside of an exchange, you can easily remain pseudo-anonymous in that anyone can see that wallet X has received Y bitcoins and send W bitcoins but without a person attached to the wallet, it's useless information.
This is way crypto currencies are regulated at the edges, if fiet to crypto is watched just like any other bank/exchange, then criminal activity has a hard time getting money out. At the end of the day, it's difficult to buy 'real' things; food, clothing, housing with bitcoin.
> Also, if you solely receive and send bitcoin outside of an exchange, you can easily remain pseudo-anonymous in that anyone can see that wallet X has received Y bitcoins and send W bitcoins but without a person attached to the wallet, it's useless information.
If this thing were a big enough problem, the government could easily require you to provide a ledger of all the parties you've transacted with (Your wallet is doing book-keeping, how hard would it be for a legitimate user to enter a small memo for every transaction, anyways?)
Failure to provide a ledger, or for your ledger to fail to cross-correlate with that of your counterparty would, of course, imply that you're a criminal.
Unlike cash, bitcoin leaves a very obvious breadcrumb trail, that can, with a bit of legislature, be turned into an incredibly useful tool for LE.
I've made this exact point before as well. High on the wish list of any authoritarian/repressive regime would be a monetary system where all economic activity and transaction is visible to them.
Also, if you solely receive and send bitcoin outside of an exchange, you can easily remain pseudo-anonymous in that anyone can see that wallet X has received Y bitcoins and send W bitcoins but without a person attached to the wallet, it's useless information.
This is way crypto currencies are regulated at the edges, if fiet to crypto is watched just like any other bank/exchange, then criminal activity has a hard time getting money out. At the end of the day, it's difficult to buy 'real' things; food, clothing, housing with bitcoin.