[ogreyonder]

Well, which is better: the illusion of privacy (which you can do nothing to further secure), or the known fact that you have no privacy in an environment where you can take steps to protect yourself?

Your bank offers the illusion of privacy. Sure, a random person can't just walk up and see your balance. But a teller can pull up your account and look around. Sysadmins can certainly see your money pop up in server logs. A particularly motivated individual might even be able to pull data from disk images or memory if they were so inclined, so how safe is that information really?

I'd argue that knowing everything is public is better. It motivates people to come up with solutions like Zerocoin and CoinJoin.

[gfodor]

You can turn this around quickly. Which is better, the actual tangible privacy your bank gives you despite its theoretical "illusion" of security, or the theoretical privacy of bitcoin which in practice is hard to maintain yourself?

[skorgu]

Either (or cash) might be appropriate depending on the transaction.

[oafitupa]

You forgot to mention Stealth Address ;)