[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

The difference is Bitcoin is much more widely used for payments. It now has a second layer payment protocol, which makes transactions fast and cheap, while remaining permissionless. And yes, it is useful. I just recently contributed to an imprisoned political dissident in my country. If made through regular credit card channels, that contribution could land me in jail.

[salawat]

It can still end you up in jail once your regulating authorities catch up to the technology. It's a distributed ledger. This should translate to "queryable public datastore of your financial transactions" in your head.

Just look at how the U.S. IRS is starting to get a subpoena process off the ground with regards to identities of wallet holders from exchanges. Even though the glacier doesn't appear to move, I assure you, it most certainly does.

Never make the mistake of assuming just because something is new meaning it will always remain that way, and if your nation state is cracking down on political people non grata, they may have no compunction with figuring out who was behind those transactions with or without your help.

This is ironically why cash not in a bank vault is the king of anonymous, difficult to trace financial activity. No paper trail.

Note: Of course banks and regulators know that too, and capital markets will do anything to make sure the maximum number of people entrust their finances to an institution to a loanmaking institution. People don't realize that ease of transaction and traceability is in and of itself a populational control mechanism.

[LanternLight83]

There are privacy-focused coins, like Monero, which are developing some pretty awesome tech