The ledger is public, the identity of a wallet can be private. You'll know money is at an address, but you will not know who owns the key to that address, or if the key was lost and those bitcoins are locked forever. You can make the argument that through KYC there are fewer private identities for wallets, and I'd agree. But that doesn't mean you can't obfuscate again. If I buy $10K USD worth of bitcoin from CoinBase and then transfer to my personal wallet, its easy for the government to track. Once I send those to someone (pay back a friend with bitcoin), now the government has to come talk to me to find out who I gave those BTC to. Then talk to him, and so on and so on. This becomes very difficult depending on transaction size. This also ignores the privacy afforded by Lightening Network. That's where the real revolution is. When I fully understood it, that's when I got really excited about bitcoin.