With BCH it becomes worthless as soon as they trace it. Then the coins and associated wallets are blacklisted on every exchange from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
This I have not heard of. Are they trying to track the coin to be sure the person can't sell them, or is it the coin itself they go after? Who tracks it?
They use automated services like Chainalysis to track the coins, it does automatic real-time warnings any institution (like a bank/exchange) that the Bitcoin is no-good/tainted.
Oh, so it only affects people selling crypto to banks. I have no interest in selling crypto anyway. I spend it instead. If anything I like that you can track bad actors.
Most people like that you can track bad actors, but who decides who is a bad actor can be the state, so you may end up with political activists being bad, which often happens.
There are cryptos that are close to 100% private, and they both make it so that privacy minded persons have an option, and it also takes some of the disagreeable actions of the BCH.
I guess to me the "public ledger" was one of the big appeals that Bitcoin first had for me. I imagine government spending on a public ledger being quite easy to track.
I am in complete agreement with you, the tools are amoral, not bad in themselves. There is a trade-off and balance and there will always be errors in both directions.