I was referring to the ability to discover that your funds have been stolen, not necessarily who stole them. (The latter usually doesn't matter, you probably w

I was referring to the ability to discover that your funds have been stolen, not necessarily who stole them. (The latter usually doesn't matter, you probably won't see the money again). The fiat system has no ability to monitor for theft. Theft can go on for years unnoticed, and by the time it is noticed, the entitiy involved may be insolvent, having a bigger effect on many people, or even the larger society if the entities are big enough. Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. If you trade through AML compliant entities, your details will be linked to transactions, and people might be able to discover who you transact with based on the public transaction information. With coinjoin and similar fungibility enhancements, that process of tracking is made far more difficult towards impossible. Also, the Lightning Network enables anonymous payments through an onion routed network, where the only public information is who you have open channels with. Anonymity will become the norm in Bitcoin even if it not the case yet. If you look at it from the perspective of a merchant, rather than from a "consumer protection" point of view, then a merchant generally does not know who defrauded them with stolen credit cards. In general, it is rarely worth investigating and businesses will generally count their losses. Entities like Paypal are notoriously bad for the seller as they side with the buyer most of the time - it isn't their money so they don't need to take it seriously. Bitcoin will benefit merchants, who can take payments which are irreversible, except by their own decisions for refunding. Consumers will need to take a bit more responsibility to vet the reputations of the merchants they deal with, instead of always being bailed out for their poor decisions.