It's a problem because third parties and counter parties can view your transaction history and follow it going forward. Not only bad for security and personal safety, but bad for fungibility in general. 

Another side affect is that targeted mining censorship becomes possible, while if Bitcoin were private, to censor a single transaction they would have to censor them all indefinitely. Much more difficult and expensive to do.

yo2xncv0

Personal_Finance

if bitcoin became illegal by law (part two)

Hamstr

Why is the ledger a problem if you bought bitcoin KYC free? I’ll concede that if I buy something and I am ID’d then the buyer could know the size of my stack. If the buyer squeals on me to the government then that is a problem. There are solutions to that, though. Sure, lightning, ecash, fedi’s, etc aren’t built out perfectly yet but the government also isn’t full evil yet, either. 

I could see Monero being a good coin for buying stuff but two things would need to be true: (1) no Bitcoin solution existing for privacy, and (2) more people accept Monero than Bitcoin. 