[Alkim]

Recent events in the Silk Road criminal trials suggest that governments have the ability to trace BTC transactions to a useful degree--witness the guilty pleas of two former federal law enforcement personnel for enriching themselves via extorting bitcoin. Yes, it does take a different mind set from conventional banking records, but ultimately everything is recorded in the blockchain.

[raesene9]

Those were 2 very specific cases, I don't think you can usefully extrapolate to a government level ability to track blockchain transactions to real identities, especially when one of the main selling points of bitcoin transaction is that (if done correctly) they cannot be tied to a real identity!