You hit the nail on the head - they are covering themselves from any financial irregularities and frauds. None of the big companies want anything to do with "Anonymous" money and it not being matched back to one particular person. It's not a twisted law, because criminals are always looking to "clean" any money that is stolen and may even go to the level of selling loaded steam accounts.
Well dang. I could just use BitSkins and the trading forum on Steam but I really wanted to use the community market and not deal with 15-day trade holds. Even mobile authenticator only works if you give it your phone number. The whole internet seems to be moving towards "real identity" operations, which I don't like one bit. The whole point of a lot of sites for me is to have another identity that I can mess around with new ideas on. Accounts to spam mean jokes of every sort and troll people for keks, accounts for talking about porn fetishes you really don't want being traced back to you (even if they're not illegal), accounts for messing around on the "grey market" (like a lot of this site) without having some prude who knows you IRL blackmailing you. I mean, if the government really needs to know who you are for national security processes they have your IP address and advanced data collection tools. I don't want everyone else knowing who I am online though.
Personally everything on my steam account was bought with Bitcoin through third-party sites and if Bitcoin is suspicious I don't want it being easily traced back to my real name so I get stuck with a lot of handicaps like trade holds, no prime matchmaking, no community market etc. It's lousy.