Not if the merchant give each buyer a new bitcoin address (best practice), did not store all their bitcoin on a single address (best practice) and used any sort of exchange to hold coins at any point (common practice) all of these would obfuscate the merchants actual holdings, sales etc. Enough so that it would be difficult for a competitor to track you accurately enough for it to be worth the effort. Plus if they did have any other bitcoin income or savings it would cloud the situation even further.
Once you are one step (transaction) away from the known address i.e. The one you sent coins to in order to track them, you have no way of knowing or proving that the merchant controls any subsequent address.
If for example bitpay handled their transactions you would see funds sent to bitpay, if the merchant kept 100% in btc but only got paid out by bitpay weekly then how do you know what was sent to the merchant?
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Not if the merchant give each buyer a new bitcoin address (best practice), did not store all their bitcoin on a single address (best practice) and used any sort of exchange to hold coins at any point (common practice) all of these would obfuscate the merchants actual holdings, sales etc. Enough so that it would be difficult for a competitor to track you accurately enough for it to be worth the effort. Plus if they did have any other bitcoin income or savings it would cloud the situation even further.
Once you are one step (transaction) away from the known address i.e. The one you sent coins to in order to track them, you have no way of knowing or proving that the merchant controls any subsequent address.
If for example bitpay handled their transactions you would see funds sent to bitpay, if the merchant kept 100% in btc but only got paid out by bitpay weekly then how do you know what was sent to the merchant?