A lot of people are interested in it because they have a particular view of economics. In particular, they like that Bitcoin (1) has a fixed monetary supply, and (2) is difficult to regulate and tax.
De-anonymization is something that we already have a lot of experience with, specifically tying a device to an individual. There’s nothing special about a public key that makes this harder.
I can't say I agree. A gov can't pry the secret key to my coins from my brain (yet). You can much more easily freeze a bank account and garnish whatever you wish.
Additionally, Satoshi himself advised to never re-use a bitcoin address. It's foolish and makes it easy to link your transactions to a single entity (you). If you use a HD wallet, which almost every bitcoin wallet software supports, and is the default in the majority of them, you will not reuse an address. This is because it becomes impossible to tell if you sent money to yourself or another person.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the following two things are true about bitcoin addresses:
1. Once I know your public key, it’s trivial to prove that an address belongs to you, since an address is nothing more than the hash of a public key.
2. If I don’t know your public key when you receive funds, figuring it out is impossible. But once you spend that money, I now know the public key that received those funds, since only the private key associated with the original address could sign a new transactions.
Those two alone should make recreating the tree of transactions a purely mechanical process, with a much lower cost than what it took to create the original chain. At this point it’s a bit like any other de-anonymizes toon attack, with the benefit of some entities being known and coercable, and some users helpfully posting addresses on their social media accounts.
On the garnishment front: this kind of depends on scope. But the one thing we’ve seen is that all monetary security goes out the window when the attacker can take possession of you. This is why using technical solutions to such scenarios have always struck me as a bit silly.
