I doubt that it is a good idea for guys to be getting scared away from transacting with bitcoin in the real world, when there are opportunities to do so. A lot of the power of bitcoin comes from being able to transact directly with other people and with no one being able to stop such transaction.
Yes, it is. The power of bitcoin is in the ability to participate in a trade transaction without any intermediaries. But the modern trend is becoming such, with the growth of the price of bitcoin and its popularity, that it becomes a little dangerous to disclose to others about the presence of your BTC (no matter how many or few btc). In society, an opinion is increasingly formed about bitcoin as a "
magic wand" that can change financial life for the better. And accordingly, more people appear to take possession of this asset not always legally and honestly. If there are no problems for p2p transactions online and you personally don't intersect with the counterparty, then in an offline transaction everything begins to look different - here it becomes easier to identify and find you. It seems to me that this will hinder the widespread use of bitcoin as a method of offline payments (one of the reasons).
So even if their main storage of bitcoin might be kept separately and private, there could be situations where guys are either transacting with large transactions or guys might be using a wallet that has a high BTC balance, and even if the amount transacted might not be large, the balance of the change can be seen.. ... so if a guy might be buying some good or service worth a few hundred dollars, yet he is using a wallet with several thousand dollars, then the person who is engaged on the other side of the transaction may well see the change address...so it seems that some of us are suggesting to use wallets (or addresses) that have lower amounts of BTC contained in them or perhaps using lightning network, it might be more difficult to see the quantity of bitcoin in the originating wallet address.
This is where the problem of pseudo-privacy of BTC comes up. Blockchain, the force that makes bitcoin unique, in this case becomes a factor that increases the user's risks. The transaction chain can always be tracked and one can guess how much bitcoin the user has stored in a "distant" wallet.
I believe that the
BTC-community is facing a problem of "hiding" wallet balances.