[shadowgovt]

I prefer to divide anonymous and pseudonymous.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It's baked into the protocol. Every transaction is public, and authenticated and authorized via cryptography. But every transaction has a name attached... Just not a name immediately linked to the human being responsible for executing the transaction.

Once that link is made, the blockchain becomes a towering monument to all that name's sins.

Contrast with a chan site, where the default configuration is that every post has a unique identifier independent from any posts previously made by an author. Depending on what data the administrator is collecting, those posts may be reversible to a human being, but tugging on one piece of the thread does not unravel the tapestry because a person's posts aren't tied to each other by default.

(HN is pseudonymous too. I post under a handle. I prefer not to link this handle to my public name. It would not take much effort to do so, and once somebody did, every comment I've ever made is immediately searchable).