I believe Bitcoin is intentionally transparent, for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is the anonymity set delta.
The smaller you are, the larger your anonymity set.
The larger you are, the smaller your anonymity set.
This makes it expensive for governments to hide their actions, but cheap for individuals.
Is this true?
I do not see the logic in this “delta set” argument. Transparent is transparent for whoever you are and is harmful for privacy and fungibility. Since Bitcoin is pseudonymous, anyone can have any any number of wallets and addresses, so anyone can obfuscate their activities to some extend by having more addresses. But this is all on chain. Governments and whales have way more means to cover their ass than individual by trading off-chain via institutions using buy-options, ETF’s, market manipulation and simply by hiring professionals to manage their Bitcoin trading for them.
I think many people forget that Bitcoin has had many flaws and bugs that got fixed over time (inflation bug, disabling OP-codes, allowing theft of outputs), simply because Bitcoin was the first successful digital currency project. Technology and research advanced greatly since its inception. Bitcoin was the best design its architects could come up with at the time but is far from perfect. Bitcoin is and needs to be highly conservative in implementing any changes since making changes is risky and highly political. Bitcoin has to deal with all this historic “baggage”. Many Bitcoiners would probably wish they could change or re-implement many parts of the project. Hence you got all these Altcoin projects and things like the Elements project to allow some more experimentation with Bitcoin on side chains.
So in summary, Bitcoin is probably not transparent by design because its architect wanted it to be, but because they simply could not come up with something better at the time and now they cannot change things without a major overhaul/hard-fork.
This is just my interpretation of events, but many people fall back to the “God argument”, something along the line of “Satoshi made it this way, and he is/was all knowing and perfect and therefore it must be the way he/she/they intended it to be for now and forever”. So they try to find some arguments to justify Bitcoins flaws (like the guy in the post you link above). In reality ideas, technology and people evolve over time. If Satoshi and other developers would have the knowledge and technology of today and could redo Bitcoin, I am quite certain they would come up with a very different and probably way better design. I would expect a design with more focus on privacy, fungibility, minimal by design and designed for the long run. Perhaps something more along the line of Grin.