 Given the current status of Bitcoin and other open blockchains, how can users who purchase their BTC on an exchange... exposing all of their anonymity protect their privacy and anonymity? Especially when governments have very sophisticated tools such as chain analysis. Should there be infrastructure and a paradigm shift on how users switch their assets from fiat to crypto? That's a great question. Right now, it's actually very difficult to protect your privacy because the fiat system has all of these rules that tie all transactions to identity. Basically, the fiat system is designed to be a surveillance machine. If your on-ramp, if you like, if your entrance into the crypto space is through the fiat system, then you start your journey under full surveillance, and as a result, your privacy is going to be severely compromised. This isn't necessarily the fault of exchanges. Exchanges are trying to work as a bridge between fiat and crypto, and fiat is a surveillance system. They can't not do the surveillance required by governments around the world when touching the fiat system. How do you maintain your privacy? How do you maintain anonymity? How do you protect your human rights, your ability to transact without everything you do under the scrutiny? Absent any suspicion or wrongdoing? How do you protect yourself? One way is to think about how you get to the crypto economy in a different way. I've talked about this before, but I think it's worth emphasizing again. That is, if instead of buying crypto, you earn it by giving your labor, your services, effectively, by selling products or services that you would sell otherwise, doing your job, and earning your income in crypto. Then it's not an exchange. It doesn't touch fiat. As a result, it's not part of the surveillance and reporting system. Of course, you may have to report your income, or you may choose not to, but you should report your income and all of the other requirements of the law, but you don't have to report which crypto address you received your income on. You have a much higher degree of privacy when you do private transactions between individuals, rather than dealing with a regulated exchange, for example. Another way is to think about various privacy services that exist that help you. Once you have crypto that you've acquired on an exchange, the address that you receive that crypto, for example by withdrawing it from the exchange, is tainted. What does that mean? That means that the moment you did a withdrawal, the exchange will have associated your identity, which they've recorded, with the address you sent the crypto to. They will either assume that that's someone you're paying if they have information of that address belonging to a merchant through other systems that are under surveillance, or they'll assume that that address belongs to you. As part of the deal that these exchanges have with various analytics firms, in order to support what they call Know Your Customer KYC and Anti-Money Laundering Regulations, AML, they will actually send information on every transaction to the analysis firms, together with the identity that they have. In return, they'll get some kind of risk score that says whether they should allow or not that transaction. This is a very dirty deal, if you like, whereby in order to receive score information about the risk of a transaction from a KYC AML perspective, the exchanges are effectively forced to send all identifying information about all incoming and outgoing transactions to the analytics firms, which means that the exchanges then become a giant surveillance machine. This also applies to all of the merchant processing, centralized points, that perhaps are building e-commerce shops or converting crypto into fiat for merchants. Again, in order for them to be able to comply with the regulations and get a risk score, or an AML score on any single transaction, they have to send all transactions with associated identity to the analytics firms. The moment you do a withdrawal, your receiving address has been tainted and associated with you. At that point, the only way to break that association is to do some transactions between your own wallets that will obfuscate the sources of those funds. Depending on your jurisdiction, that may be perfectly legal, or it might not be. I'm not going to give you legal advice as to whether you should or shouldn't do that. Simply know that there are tools out there that will allow you, in places where that is legal, to add a layer of privacy to your transactions by mixing cryptocurrency transactions with your wallets and other wallets, which in some jurisdictions is perfectly legal and in some others is not. It will allow you to perhaps add some distance between an address that has been identified as yours and an address that you want to use in the future.