The original design was for transactions to remain pseudonymous from end to end, and the public records remained as such until you cash-out. It is here that we lost the pro-privacy gift of the blockchain.
The moment you cash-out your bitcoin to a bank or an exchange or to any other means that requires a real world identity, pseudonymity is lost. Satoshi's rally for privacy goes down the drain. Your identity is uncovered. They can already trace your bitcoin wallet address and all other wallet addresses you transacted with.
The effort of pseudonymity is lost. But is there really a way out? Can we really remain pseudonymous to continue the blockchain's rally for privacy?
The moment you cash-out your bitcoin to a bank or an exchange or to any other means that requires a real world identity, pseudonymity is lost. Satoshi's rally for privacy goes down the drain. Your identity is uncovered. They can already trace your bitcoin wallet address and all other wallet addresses you transacted with.
The effort of pseudonymity is lost. But is there really a way out? Can we really remain pseudonymous to continue the blockchain's rally for privacy?
You are absolutely correct! But do we have a wayout? Can we really use bitcoin or any other crypto for our daily expenses like buying groceries or buying fuel for vehicle etc.? The answer is NO and that is the reason why we have no other options than to give away the pseudo-anonymity to make our bitcoins useful. Have we had the choice of using bitcoins for our daily expenses, we would have loved to retain that! We are giving this away because we don't have any options available!
There is only one way out as I see it! We need more merchants to adopt bitcoin as a payment option. When I say merchants, I do not mean Expedia or Starbucks because they are not merchants who sells daily products like groceries and domestic goods. unless and until we see merchants accepting cryptos as a payment option, we are forced to give away our identity because we have no other options than to exchange it to our local currency before we can use it.
At this point of time, adoption is very much important to see bitcoin to grow to the next level. HODL and trading is all right but the growth will only be fueled if we can use bitcoin as a currency in our daily lives. Otherwise, all will go down in drain if it continues to remain as an investor's asset.
If it's there - get it there, if it' not - help in bringing it there by offering your service to other users. All of that for free and everybody in the community is a winner here. And yet it's been there for some time already, decentralized, free, pseudonymous as the bitcoin itself and... and lacking participation by that very same community which is mostly whining about lacking options to spend their cryptos, while too busy bountyhunting, promoting zero real life value ICOs and running back to the corrupt institutions of the pre-crypto economy whenever they got a buck from cryptos, lol 
Not sure about the anonymity, but I definitely don't think Satoshi envisioned BTC with having necessity for fiat gateways implementations... If it can be free/independent - it really should be. That's what I got from the whitepaper at least... Hopefully more people would understand this as the network matures. Hodl and trading might be all right, but increasing usability of the network or participating in transferring of the fiat economy functions to blockchain is the good ol' black here.
