In the article she specifically talks about how blockchains are a godsend for data harvesters. I think it's disingenuous to pick out one of her criticisms, ignore the rest and say "that criticism by itself isn't as bad as the alternative".
This isn't am inherent problem with blockchains though. Privacy blockchains exist. Monero transactions don't reveal much. There's no way to tell who's sending the money, who's receiving it or even how much.
I believe it's due to ignorance of the increasing risks associated with bitcoin and of the existence of better technology. Smarter criminals are already using Monero.
> You really can't infer that much from looking at the blockchain, especially when there is no address re-use.
You don't even have to infer anything. Just look up a known address and you can see its entire transaction history. There are rich lists which allow you to track whales. You can literally see them deposit the coins on Binance when they're about to dump on the market.
> Even less when CoinJoin is used. You can make some probabilistic guesses at best.
This is not a good idea. The coin anonymizer transactions will be there for all to see. Your money is tainted the second it passes through these systems even if you do it for privacy reasons. Exchanges will refuse these coins and as a result so will everyone else because they won't be able to cash them out. They might as well be worthless.
This sort of anonymizing feature has to be built into the system in such a way that it is always enabled for everyone and can't be turned off. Anonymous money should be the rule and it should be impossible to break it. That way nobody can be discriminated against for protecting their privacy. If you can discriminate against coins based on their origin, they are not fungible.
> Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", was using Bitcoin extensively and never got identified through the blockchain
That was years ago.
The risk is practically non-existent, they're not getting caught through the blockchain.
> You don't even have to infer anything. Just look up a known address and you can see its entire transaction history. There are rich lists which allow you to track whales. You can literally see them deposit the coins on Binance when they're about to dump on the market.
That shows a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin wallets work. There are some services that claim to track the inflow/outflow of Bitcoins to exchanges but they are very approximate and you can't track individual "whales". If you use a modern wallet there really shouldn't be more than 2 Bitcoin transactions per address (in and out).
> Exchanges will refuse these coins and as a result so will everyone else because they won't be able to cash them out.
That is false.
PS: I know there are blockchains with better anonymity than Bitcoin but please, slow down with the overstatements.