I think anonymous/not anonymous binary distinction is too black/white. Bitcoin is more anonymous than a bank transaction. If I buy something with a credit card

I think anonymous/not anonymous binary distinction is too black/white. Bitcoin is more anonymous than a bank transaction. If I buy something with a credit card, they have my credit card number that is easily linked to me. With Bitcoin it is less easy. Unfortunately with Bitcoin once you have been 'revealed' then your transaction 'graph' is then revealed in the public, whereas the credit card doesn't have that problem. It depends who you want to be anonymous from. Governments can easily get bank transactions, and also they can investigate bitcoin-based crime and then just trace the public ledger. Businesses will not easily get bank transactions or map general bitcoin addresses to people, but if you use a credit card you tend to have to give them a lot of other matching information such as your name and address, whereas with bitcoin you don't need to give them anything. Assuming there is no delivery involved it can be pretty anonymous. But again if they did happen to pattern match (maybe they have another customer who you have dealt with too) they could join some dots. But to be safe it's best to assume Bitcoin is not anonymous and that anyone can find out eventually where you have spent your money.