I was having an argument with a friend. He says that you can't be anonymous to the bitcoin's network. Both nodes and wallets use, leads to an ip address where information can be found.
I had read in this forum that you can hide it with hardware? How exactly?
Quite true, you can't be anonymous in bitcoin's network. Blockchain alone is an open book for every transaction, absolutely every transaction is included in blockchain and you can search any of them. The whole magic lies in how successfully you are able to track target. In past, governments and people in overall weren't good at it but right now, see, a lot of people who use bitcoin for illegal purposes (got coins from exchange hacks and etc) are getting caught very soon.
If you want anonymity, there are better options that are created specifically for it, for example - monero.
If you want to track IP, then you need to own high percentage of nodes and your target's wallet directly connected to one of your nodes.
On another hand, you can achieve high anonymity in bitcoin's network, everything hugely depends on your actions too. For example, if your client connects on PC that's 100% clean and then connect VPN/Tor and mine bitcoins in a pool (depends on pool too) and use mixers that meet high standard of anonymity, then it will be very, very hard for anyone to detect.