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It's because the seller has chosen the option to keep the identities of the bidders private.
Ebay introduced this option to prevent other sellers from contacting bidders to solicit business.
If the seller didn't choose this option, you'd see the bidder's full Ebay ID.
EDIT: And the flip-side to this is the seller can create fake IDs and use the fakes to bid on their own auctions to drive up the price. This is known as shill bidding, and hiding bidder identities makes it more difficult to detect.
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