Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?
No, privacy from every idiot who wants to front-run you, or play amateur detective and figure out a lot of private things about your business or personal affairs and publish them. I've seen both happen on this forum.
Most businesses and people are just too obscure and unimportant to warrant much interest from the NSA or from the largest globalist corporations. But they all have nosy neighbors, with varying degrees of sophistication.
Though if the global police state does evolve to the point where everyone is a person-of-interest, then indeed it will be a dark age, and it isn't clear whether cryptography and cryptocurrencies can help with that at all. Maybe.
Don't know if you read the edit I did on my prior post.
Problem is that if anyone is collecting that data (even if the NSA has no desire to analyze it or retain it forever), they can be potentially hacked or individual employees bribed. The prize is so valuable, it nearly insures another Edward Snowden will surface yet with a profit motive to exploit that dataset. The problem is that even to collect that data means they have peeping routers all over the major backbones and these are thus vulnerable to hacking and bribes, etc..
When we live in a world where it is possible to collect all data, then the defense against bad outcomes with your data (and the greater threat than the NSA w.r.t. to data aggregation may be Google, Ad Sense, and Facebook Likes) is perhaps not to depend on the implausibility of statistical correlation (which may not be so implausible as the naive assumption, e.g. per my examples above and in the general paradigmatic category), rather perhaps to depend on keeping your assets stored in micro-granular Knowledge Creation paradigms instead of stored monetary calls on labor (which I claim is a dying paradigm). The data aggregator can't do anything with aggregated data against a micro-granular asset with attributes perhaps orthogonal to the flows of popularity. I mean everyone can see which ventures are popular and trending by numerous means such as Google metrics. Transparency aids competition which accelerates knowledge creation. The government can't tax to death a populous activity without declaring a global Dark Age (which has never occurred, i.e. even during the Dark Age in Western Europe the prosperity trended up else where).
As for being vulnerable to haters, I am surely vulnerable by posting on this forum and not being anonymous. This seems to go along with any action on the internet. I read where some teenager in the Philippines shot another teenager because of some insulting remark about a girl friend on Facebook. I am not so sure that anonymity can be holistically ubiquitous to protect me from all the potential ways the internet spreads the opportunities to be hated and not anonymous. It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth). Other than the risk of large wealth (and the obvious issues that raises) and being outspoken on the internet (and the conflicts that raises), my personal life story is a prime example of how risk to life and limb comes from chaotic, unexpected directions, so I don't know if focused on the very difficult issue of anonymous money transfer stands out as the greatest risk in most people's lives.
Any way I am not sure. So as I wrote, I am hedging my bets by still pursuing anonymity, but I have deprioritized it somewhat (not entirely) to focus more on micro-transactions.
Edit: I am contemplating whether it is possible that fungibility could be orthogonal to anonymity. Fungibility could first be defined as the ability to get your transactions into the majority consensus of the block chain, instead of a stricter definition that would require that anyone who accepts such a transaction can't be coerced nor hassled by the government nor whom ever. As long as you can get your transactions on the block chain, then if you spend them to parties that careless about coercion (e.g. in small morsels in social interactions where the government can't possibly go after every person who received a microtransaction). So instead of just anonymity designs, I have also been thinking a lot about how to insure block chain inclusion remains permissionless.