I really don't understand why anyone thinks that anonymous money is a good idea. I'm as big a fan of freedom as the next person, but it seems to me that the primary purpose of anonymous money is to do an end-run around the law.

[UPDATE] Let me try to make this a little more precise: I don't understand the appeal of anonymous digital money. Physical cash is very useful, and I would not want it to go away. But even physical cash is not completely anonymous because you have to be physically present to exchange it, which entails a certain amount of risk, and that puts some checks-and-balances on potential abuses. Anonymous digital money does away with those checks-and-balances and makes a lot of activities with questionable societal value like crypto-extortion much more lucrative than they were before. For example, malware that encrypts your hard drive for ransom was unheard of before the advent of Bitcoin.