How anonymous is bitcoin, really?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

bitcoin blockchain, the immutable public ledger that has recorded all transactions since the cryptocurrency’s launch in January 2009. Bitcoin represents a techno-utopian dream. Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous inventor, proposed that the world run not on centralized financial institutions but on an egalitarian, math-based electronic money system distributed through a computer network. And the system would be “trustless” — that is, it would not rely on a trusted party, such as a bank or government, to arbitrate transactions. Rather, as Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in a 2008 white paper, the system would be anchored in “cryptographic proof instead of trust.” Or, as T-shirts proclaim: “In Code We Trust.” The practicalities have proved complicated. Price turbulence is enough to induce the bitcoin bends, and the system is environmentally destructive, since the computational network uses exorbitant amounts of electricity.

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Blackburn said her project was agnostic to bitcoin’s pros and cons. Her goal was to pierce the scrim of anonymity, track the transaction flow from Day 1 and study how the world’s largest cryptoeconomy emerged. Satoshi Nakamoto had presented the currency as anonymous: For bitcoin transactions (buying, selling, sending, receiving etc.), users employ pseudonyms, or addresses — alphanumeric cloaks that hide their real identities. And there was apparent confidence in the anonymity; in 2011, WikiLeaks announced that it would accept donations via bitcoin. But over time, research revealed data leakage; the identity protections weren’t so