Re: Will blockchain survive the crackdown on mixers and anonymization?
The fight is not against Bitcoin or Blockchain but against privacy because the authorities want to see everything and everyone clearly in regards to what they have and how they are moving it. Mixers and every other thing that makes this task difficult for them is an enemy that must be taken down. As expected, they will not take them down without making them look evil to gain public sympathy that is why they link all manner of crimes to privacy systems just to take them down. After mixers and other privacy systems have been taken out, this will be like there was never a crackdown because they would have succeed in getting every information they needed to establish full regulation.
It depends on what you mean by, "privacy".
If you mean privacy from criminals, from companies, from marketers, and from other citizens, then most governments aren't against that, and many governments are putting more and more privacy protections for consumers on the books e.g. Europe's GDPR and recent US regulations.
If you mean "privacy" from valid government subpoenas, then yes, governments are against that since that kind of "privacy" enables terrorism, cyber-extortion, and all kinds of very bad things.
And yes, they make these people "look evil" because they are, well, evil
. Ask any victim of cyber-extortion how it felt to have their money, privacy, hospital care, and so on stolen from them. There are, unfortunately, some very bad people in the world, and governments need to do things to protect citizens from those people.