Digital money has the same counter.
Bitcoin runs on a public ledger, which means every payment is written into a shared record that anyone can read. Your name is not written there. What is written is a long string of characters called an address, and the amounts moving between addresses. So the record is open and it is nameless, right up until something ties a name to an address.
That tie almost always happens at a boundary. A boundary is any place where money crosses between two systems. A bank account into an exchange, which is a company that swaps dollars for coins. That exchange into a wallet you control. That wallet into a shop that settles in dollars. To cross, most people use a company that is required by law to know who they are.
Privacy inside any one system is capped by the least private place value enters or leaves it. You can be careful for years on the open ledger, and a single withdrawal to a verified account ties your name to the whole trail sitting behind it.
The case on the other side deserves room, and it is a good one. That same counter is the only place a mistake gets undone. When somebody sends money to a wrong address, or a scammer walks off with it, the company that saw both sides can freeze it, trace it, or make somebody whole. A crossing that shows nothing to anyone helps nobody on the day something breaks. Offered that choice, most people take the recoverable version. They are trading one thing they value for another, with their eyes open.
What would show me wrong: people crossing between systems at real volume without any single company learning both sides, while disputes still get resolved at a rate ordinary users accept. If that arrives, the boundary stopped being the weak point and I read the risk wrong.
For Bitcoin the useful version of this is small and checkable. Look at what you hold and count how many hops separate it from one account that holds a copy of your ID. A hop is one payment moving from one address to the next. Two hops is a different life from ten. That count moves with what you do next, and it is the part of your privacy you can change this week.
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