Envisioning the digital tech deeply the thoughts of privacy have died away for wants to track criminals. The privacy never stayed, staring at the responses above me. Not Trying to complicate the thread, was there ever a certain day where the network was private and people staying truly anonymous and untracked?
People are anonymous in the blockchain, only your transactions are tracked, no name or identity is attached to your wallet, therefore no one knows who own a particular wallet unless if it is a centralized exchange wallet. According to the overall story, Jimmy was caught after sending $800 worth of Bitcoin to centralized KYC exchange, which means since he stole the Bitcoin, his bitcoin wallet address was under watch list, but nobody knows the owner of the wallet until he made a transaction to a centralized exchange wallet that reveled his identity because if the KYC he submitted in the exchange.
This is another reason to avoid CEX.KYC in centralized exchanges goes against the privacy of Bitcoin, the moment a person submits their KYC it's no longer private and the identity of the wallet owner can revealed if it's an address that is being monitored by the authorities. I think that it's only p2p transaction between two parties that their privacy can be guaranteed, so jimmy, probably didn't get an accomplice to do the p2p with and he went to a CEX and got bursted. So I can say that Bitcoin can only be linked to the right owner when the owner submits their KYC, otherwise Blockchain don't require names and the identity of the wallet owner will remain anonymous.