I do not operate under the delusion that I will stop my bank or payment card provider from seeing my transactions, or that my government can't obtain a lawful order to inspect the details of my finances. My interest is in protecting my privacy from people who are not in those domains: my local bodega owner, a bored Internet denizen who decides that They Just Don't Like Me, a snooping relative. I do not want to live in a world where those people, by default, get to see and evaluate my financial behavior. That, so far, is the only world that immutable public ledgers currently offer me.

Thus far, privacy in the blockchain space seems to have become more expensive, not "better" in either the statistical or colloquial sense of the word. I'll believe it when I see it. In the mean time, the dollars I use to buy my morning coffee are about as anonymous as they were yesterday, last week, and last year.