Well, this is becoming a rather long thread, but I'll just make what I think are the key points: If, as is presumed in this discussion, society will become divided into two somewhat distinct groups of people, the crypto-anonymous group and the traceable-identifiable group, then the predictable outcome is that members of the traceable-identifiable group will become increasingly victimized by members of the crypto-anonymous group. People who are easily identifiable and tracked are easy prey. For example, if you can see when John Doe is logged in at home or logged in at his office, then you can burglarize his home while he is at the office and vice versa. If, as some government agencies would like, all motor vehicle records were online, a criminal could go 'shopping' on the internet, pick out the make and model he wants, look up the owner's address and go steal it. There are lots of other examples, such as seeing how much money is in various people's bank accounts, then target those who have money, etc... (Identifiable people are also likely to be targets of spam and other annoyances, and I suspect the proliferation of spam is encourgaing a great number of people to explore the possibilities for anonymous posting.) This situation is going to put an increasing amount of pressure on those in the traceable-identifiable group to change their ways. They will have two choices: either they start using crypto, remailers, etc to protect their privacy and protect themselves from criminals, or they can demand more identification and restrict their interactions with others such that they only associate with suitably identified persons. The net result of this is that it's easy (and economically desirable) for people in the 'traceable-identifiable' group to join the 'crypto-anonymous' group, but vary hard for anonymous personas to interact with the identified group. As such, the number of people demanding identification of their correspondents will decline. (Another way to look at it, is that crypto-anonymity is a high-entropy, and hence stable, situation, whereas tracable-identifiability is a low-entropy and metastable state, which spontaneously degrades into the former in the absense of a constraining force.) This is why cryptoanarchy is inevitable.