Great topic, Dave. I seem to care about both equally. I care about my privacy as much as I care about my anonymity. I did indeed make a lot of mistakes in the past and I am still making them, but I am getting better at it overall and this is the best part.
I have separated my "public" life from my private one. I've done big changes in my lifestyle to accommodate with my private way of living. This means getting rid of many accounts and platforms people typically use, carefully choosing specific smartphones and the software & OS I'm running on them (same goes for laptops and PCs), taking cameras and mics out of my devices, preferring to pay more rather than share my data with strangers and so on.
One perfect example I'd like to give is getting rid of "discount cards". Pharmacies, stores etc here in Romania have certain "discount" or "loyalty" cards that we can use to buy stuff for cheaper. But this data is almost every time linked to very personal information of yours such as ID, driver's license etc. I can now create a card within 2 minutes and buy stuff for up to 70% cheaper - but is it worth the discount? Is my personal data worth a 70% discount at a supermarket? In my opinion, it is not. It's worth much more. So I ditched my cards and now I'm paying much more money for everyday stuff. But my local pharmacy doesn't know anymore what kind of treatments I take, what kind of condoms I buy, whether I prefer cash or card and which card do I use for certain products.
Now let's go back to BTC. I think that if you care about privacy or anonymity, Bitcoin is for now a bad choice. That is until BTC <-> XMR atomic swaps become easy to use (and widely used) and are tested well enough for bugs to be extremely rare or inexistent (which I think is impossible since, AFAIK, any code has a flaw - you just need to find it).
Also, that is until Bitcoin adopts a more private way to go. Perhaps Schnorr signatures are the first good step. I don't know - the point I'm trying to make is, Bitcoin is still a transparent ledger and no matter how much you try to be private, one mistake could reveal your entire history. That is very, very bad - almost as if you robbed 100 banks, got caught for one but they linked all 100 to you. That makes everything so much worse for you legally. Sorry for the example - I never really link privacy to bad stuff since privacy is NOT being a criminal, but this is the best one I could think of.
On the other hand, even XMR isn't good if you're inexperienced. Use the same address on multiple websites while shopping and you're about to get some of your financial history linked together.
Now let's see what you can do about it.
- Make your BTC private or use XMR. When shopping, try to avoid online shopping as much as possible so that the address & name issue is avoided.
- Use Coin Control for Bitcoin. Use disposable seeds/addresses for XMR or BTC. Use disposable SIM cards. Use disposable, $10 mobile phones. Dispose of anything you can afford to dispose if you want to keep your tracks limited and harder to link.
- If you create a ProtonMail account, use Tor. Pay with private Bitcoin and then mix your coins again. Yes, you pay for an account creation, but if the Switzerland ever gets ProtonMail to share your e-mail's logged IPs, your home IP will never appear there. Do the same for a BitcoinTalk account. Try to keep your traces as limited as possible.
Living a private life is expensive, so I have to miss out on a lot of stuff to live mine that way. Sure, it's expensive, but at the end of the day you feel so much safer knowing there's no camera watching you, no mic listening to you, nobody tracking your pharmaceutical purchases and, ultimately, having no stranger in your private bubble.