Yea, the government might be able to trace who owns what coins... but how can we... how can we as regular people avoid buying some centralized piece of crap coin, with absolute certainty.
being a bad coin has nothing to do with traceability of the coin. and you are exaggerating the power of tracing who owns what by the government!
if you buy the usual coins (BTC, LTC, ETH) or even the fully anonymous coins (XMR,...) from an exchange like poloniex, bittrex, ... of course they will know who owns what, that is easy and it has nothing to do with the coin itself it is the method you used to buy those coins.
a bad coin (worst coins ever) are those which created a big expectation but didn't even live up to 10% of that expectation in my opinion. i would like to nominate Ethereum for the top of that list. because all the advertisement of it was focusing on being scaleable, cheap, fast, secure, easy to use, decentralized, ... and so far all of these have been proven to be wrong.
thanks for all the feed back, links, etc... 
Is there a way to analyze a block chain and associate multiple addresses with one wallet or ip, to get a better picture of how distributed or not a coin is
Is there a way to analyze a block chain and associate multiple addresses with one wallet or ip, to get a better picture of how distributed or not a coin is
with IP? no
with same wallet? there are some chain analysis techniques that can be used to "guess" this but it is never 100% accurate.