It’s just that, the persona have been on top of his/her/their game and had a deep understanding of what they did intend to archive. That’s how I would like to imagine it.
Satoshi Nakamoto, as a cypherpunk, knew how important privacy is. I am not saying that Satoshi Nakamoto implemented Bitcoin alone, nor that he never interacted with other people. In fact, there are multiple emails where Satoshi Nakamoto exchanged ideas and thoughts with a lot of people. They also had an account in this forum, where he interacted with a lot of users. But, what I am saying is, nobody knew who they were in real life.
Oh yeah, we are very much on the same page on this now.
It’s some unique quality but in one instance, you serve as mixers and coin offerers all in one.
Cash has existed for centuries, in much larger scale, and is equally or even less traceable than Monero. Yet, no user was subjected to using its banknotes for "mixing". Everyone accepted it.
I don’t fully understand what is been said here but, my closest deduction is that, models to traceability happens to have changed over the years and one hardly finds a need to wish eliminate traces in fiat or banknotes except when it’s sure to be subject to questioning, laundered money and it’s related means to handling money that raises an eyelid.
Fiat uses protocols that uses less publicity to ensure privacy although, the transaction is widely open between parties (senders, third party processing the transaction and receivers).
Modern day Bitcoin adopt a model that dissociates the person from the address but publicizes the transaction for verification and adoption into nodes to ensure privacy.
Now, the trick here is that, your privacy depends on how you use an address as it could be linked to you if you frequently use the address or have by some means linked it to a persona on some platform that seeks KYC. Know that this might be exploited.
This method ensures that elicit usage of the system could have some traces should there have been any loophole in the way you managed your privacy or associate address.
This is where mixers came into play and with the talked about XMR trying to adopt models that resembles that of mixers to ensure privacy, it’s sure to be attacked and having any center clearing makes it vulnerable unlike Bitcoin.
What I also wonder is whether a backdoor could in any case be detected as having been introduced deliberately by someone? I am sure there are cases where it could be, but there are probably cases where someone could say it was just a mistake in the code.
AI continues to be the order of the day and the sophistication of technology in our time brings to question if this or that could stand in the Bitcoin models but my studies so far gives me no reason to doubt Bitcoins continued existence and growth with regards to sophistication. Given that by the absence of no coin issuers, it’s adopted system to persist by popular votes where each IP stands for a single vote and works in a chain, having nodes for verification and storage of data.
This remains a free to join and should you leave at some point, your always welcomed to rejoin and accept all valid transaction while you were absent to continue the chain and maintain integrity of the system.
This doesn’t give much time for any exploitation as, any delayed step increases the gaps between a node for which an attacker could hope to exploit and the exponential difference decreases the level of success of an attacker.
Is there any evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto deliberately avoided adding privacy-related protocols and functionality into Bitcoin in order to avoid the ban-hammer?
In terms of privacy, maybe Satoshi Nakamoto did.
Been a privacy specialist, the pioneer had to study other coins that exited before that time, the issues they had and how they were vulnerable to the government, dissociated from the invention from been a hotspot to the invention, adopted models that works and bringing in a model that would ensure the sustainability of this new invention. Some of those is by not making privacy absolute.