The decoy method doesn't even work because a smart criminal could just check your exchange withdrawals for amounts. You'd have to hope that they were ignorant enough.
It's becoming increasingly difficult. Data leaks, address and name leaks and chain analysis have made it easier to track who owns what. If crime agencies are able to track wallets down then criminals are too.
Google is a privacy antagonist. Apple is privacy focused because it suits their business. Apple has been privacy focused for years and has built several technologies to prove it. It's not hollow marketing to build privacy software.
There is no serious person that could think that Google is a privacy focused company. Their entire business is founded on knowing everything about their users. It's an ad company. They need user data to function and they will never release tech that compromises their business. Just look at the direction of ad blocking and chrome to see where they are headed.
Okay but from an evolutionary sense which company should we be supporting. The one company that is somewhat moving towards privacy or the 10 others that don't give a shit. Which one should survive. Would you like to see companies that copy Apple's privacy approach or Facebook's dumb fucks approach.
I'm not aware of any other company of Apple's size (or anywhere approaching) that have been as committed to privacy tech. Of course they are not perfect and sometimes get it wrong but they constantly release new technologies that are furthering our privacy. Who else does it better?
Homomorphic encryption is broadly useful and in fact should be ubiquitous for remote computation that leaks private data (not to comment specifically on Apple's implementation). They did open source it though, which gives you an idea that they want others to follow.
Not really they are moving into homomorphic encryption where the entire query and processing is encrypted and Apple has no knowledge of the what you actually requested.
It has inbuilt clients that connect to Tor, IPFS and an ad blocker that can generate a small amount of income just for browsing the web. Their token is used to pay users for receiving adverts. ICO probably wasn't necessary but at the time it was a good way of both marketing and raising money.
It should also be noted in the 7 years since launch that a large portion of that 59% would have been sold or lost and hence re-distributed to other users on the platform.
Modern light clients don't use that much battery and are optimised for mobile usage. They even have very short start times making use of snapshotting and back filling headers i.e. you ask all nodes on the network that latest snapshot header close to the head and start from there working back towards genesis. This can be even faster than using an RPC and is far more decentralised.
North Korea didn't use them yet to layer stolen funds. Just a matter of time before ZCash and Monero developers are all arrested if this is the precedent.
I think that the best way for Coinbase to combat this is to make as much information public as possible in as close to real time. For example they have a listings website - make every application public in real time. If there are meetings about which asset to add then make the meeting public or the minutes immediately after the meeting. The only way this can be exploited is because there was some lag time between assets that were considered to be listed and the actual announcement.
It doesn't help that they have employed some highly unethical actors in the past and completely failed to do their due diligence. For example when they employed people that were involved in selling hacking tools to nation states that were used in human rights abuses.
PoW equally rewards early participants because they take the lions share of the initial blocks. Satoshi is a multi-billionaire. There are very few blockchains that don't heavily favour early adopters and for good reason: it acts as a bootstrapping mechanism for the community. Why would anyone participate in a chain they would get heavily diluted rewards when there are many others that reward early loyalty?
Blockchains solve the trusted intermediary problem which is far more general concept than double spending. It's also a common misconception that blockchains are anonymous; they are pseudoanonymous and there are companies devoted to de-anonymising and tying real world users to transactions. They do this quite successfully. There are ongoing efforts to completely anonymise computation and transactions on the blockchain using ZK snarks but most today are not using this. Also those use-cases you mention are the low hanging fruit, but as more time passes and the technology matures I expect to see a much broader range of uses for trust-less computation.
My intuition tells me that if an asset class rises steadily (albeit with volatility) for 10+ Years the majority of investors would be in profit. Anecdotes aside. Do you have data that suggests otherwise? I would be surprised if you did.