Only as an artifact of how laws currently work, not a necessary aspect of how transactions have to work. We could definitely have a system where eg all CC proc

Only as an artifact of how laws currently work, not a necessary aspect of how transactions have to work. We could definitely have a system where eg all CC processing must be done through a firewalled system such that the business only ever learns that the payment was successful (unless there is a dispute). Edit: Europe tries to approximate this with the GDPR system of “you can only use information for the purposes for which it was collected” but that doesn’t stop them from seeing your identity like I described.