> True, but its much harder to dox this number of people if all you have is a big list of Bitcoin addresses.
This is also true of any other mechanism: if this was just a list of credit card transaction IDs, it'd be hard to do much with it as well. The problem is when you combine those with other metadata and it seems highly unlikely that anyone would spontaneously stop collecting that information.
Sort of true, but also credit card numbers are useless without the PII metadata. If you're storing credit card info like this then you pretty much have to store the sensitive stuff that can be used to dox people alongside it. The metadata isn't a requirement in the Bitcoin case. In fact, the way that bitcoin works, you wouldn't even end up with a centralized list like this of all the donors to get leaked in the first place. Some interested journalist or activist would have to go and manually compile it by looking at all the transactions themselves.
Do you think they would not otherwise store names if they weren't accepting credit card donations? If they were using Bitcoin, I'd bet that the only difference might be the lack of a billing address — it seems exceedingly unlikely that the crowdsourcing site or people running the campaign weren't planning to be able to contact their supporters and in many cases they need that for accounting or tax purposes, too.
This is also true of any other mechanism: if this was just a list of credit card transaction IDs, it'd be hard to do much with it as well. The problem is when you combine those with other metadata and it seems highly unlikely that anyone would spontaneously stop collecting that information.