"I’m not a bitcoin person, but I still don’t understand why people think of bitcoin as more private than other transactional systems when the whole premise of bitcoin is a publicly shared ledger."
You don't have to provide personally identifiable data to transact.
As far as I can tell, this is not achievable digitally with any traditional currencies.
Yes it requires connectivity that might yield personally identifiable data, just like every other method of connectivity via the internet.
That's not longer the case in Germany (don't know whether this is the case in other EU countries though) where it requires a verified account with Paysafe (PostIdent no less).
That must be a rather recent change (1. January?) because the last Paysafecard I used didn't require me to do anything like that, that was maybe 3-4 months ago to pay for an online-hoster.
You don't have to provide personally identifiable data to transact.
As far as I can tell, this is not achievable digitally with any traditional currencies.
Yes it requires connectivity that might yield personally identifiable data, just like every other method of connectivity via the internet.