Know your customer and AML (Anti Money Laundering) are basically ways of justifying surveillance. You are required to submit documents such as a passport or driving license in order to gain access to exchanges on which you can swap your filthy fiat for Bitcoin.

You will hear that this is to protect you. At some point, I will write / or link to an article on the subject which details the figures of succesful prosecutions that have resulted from this 'safety precaution'.
You can of course trust the powers that be with your sensitive information...

The claim is that the authorities will be able to stop criminal transactions if only they know how much Bitcoin you have, when you bought it and all the external addresses you've ever transacted with...
In the same way that an airborne virus will respect a 6ft gap, this makes total sense and is not in anyway masking alterior motives.

Goverments across the globe are working on implementing a 'Central Bank Digital Currency'. Whilst there are murmurs of many flavours, common talking points are the inherant possibilities of stopping people from spending their money on certain goods "Why Mr. Zaphrenic, you've reached your quota of fuel for the week and so until the first of next month your money won't work on transactions containing diesel" and "Good Citizens of the country - unite in understanding that the economy is slowing due to factors beyond our control* and so we encourage you to get out and Spend! Spend Spend!

*Absolutely nothing to do with money printing. Oh, by the way, if you don't spend 20% of your money by Friday of next week, we'll presume it was an error and will helpfully remove it from your account to prevent any embarrassing situations amongst the members of your community.
It's for the good of everyone, you understand.

The open source nature of the Bitcoin Code, makes it easy for anyone to copy it, tweak it a little, add a marketing campaign declaring it's faster / more private / scaleable than Bitcoin and then listing it on numerous exchanges.

There are at the time of writing over 8000 'alternatives' to Bitcoin.

Do your own homework and the chances are you will end up with the understanding that dabbling with others is what my friend and I like to refer to as 'The Price of Education'.

Reading this site and many others like it could save you that costly endeavour.

Someone that deals in anything that isn't Bitcoin.

People have created sh*tcoins to illustrate both how easy it is to do and to reveal the lack of utility these tokens have. In some cases, by the time the video has been on YouTube for 24 hours, the joke token has already ended up with a rapidly increasing market cap...