I think it's both: people who have something to hide for the government can make it pretty hard (but not impossible) for the authorities to track them down. On

I think it's both: people who have something to hide for the government can make it pretty hard (but not impossible) for the authorities to track them down. On the other hand average people who don't have "anything to hide" have no reason to bother implementing these counter-measures, making it fairly easy to track their transactions on the public blockchain. In this case even the pros messed it up, but this is a very high profile case with undoubtedly a massive amount of manpower thrown at it in various agencies. You don't mess with USA's oil. And even then it's unclear if the money was actually confiscated.