Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:
Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcementOne example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.
Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.
This is really very interesting. And this also it putting a tombstone on the dreams of mass adoption preserving anonimity. You won't be able to have both.
Whoever had such dreams was as delusional as those thinking that using Coinbase wouldn't end up in IRScentral. I mean it's really ridiculous how deluded people are. Amazon is working with NSA for a while, their Alexa thing is an spying robot straight from Orwell.
Anonymity will never be mainstream. Governments are anti-anonymity, they want to know where your money is and what are you doing, that's what government's do. Who is surprised about corporations complying with that?
What would Amazon possibly gain from doing otherwise? how would Amazon possibly let people buy anonymously and get away with it? These things don't work like that, as long as governments exist.