As a "replacement" for the banks? Get real people. Show me how to convert labor into bitcoin and back again, without using the banking system,

You don’t need to use the banking system. If someone pays you in Bitcoin, they just send it to your address. People only use the exchanges because they want fiat. If fiat was not necessary or desirable, you would deal in pure crypto sent directly to each other.

and without leaving a neon paper trail permanently etched into the cybersphere, and I might take people more seriously.

Having a “paper trail” is mandatory, because that’s where the security comes from.

Your wallet doesn’t need to be connected to your identity though. If I know Bitcoin has been sent from wallet X to wallet Y to wallet Z, I don’t know if it has left your possession at all. You could own all three wallets. That information is not encoded in the blockchain.

So a simple privacy measure is to make a new wallet for every transaction, which can be done automatically by software.

That is a lot of what the privacy focused coins do, in addition to off chain or mixing of inputs.

The weakness of cryptocurrency in a privacy sense is the exchanges, and everyone’s need to convert back to fiat. That’s where they will get your identity from.