Satoshi's largest error was not making Bitcoin private by default and it strikes me as out of character given his/her level of commitment to being anonymous.
First, it isn’t easy technically. Especially back when you’re designing the very first decentralized cryptocurrency and have no prior experience informing your design. ZCash, Monero, MimbleWimble and others came later after learning from Bitcoin, and there’s zero chance they could have come first.
Second, shielded transactions risk undetected inflation bugs, which actually happened to ZCash some years ago.
Third, Bitcoin was designed shortly after the Liberty Dollar founder was arrested and jailed, and everyone in Bitcoin was concerned about that too, including Satoshi. He may have decided just not to push his luck.
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/privacy/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770
It seems like satoshi thought pseudo-anonyminity was sufficient. The integration of zero-knowlege proofs into cryptocurrencies was not really well understood at the time.
>we could just iterate on existing ones, and have our userbase intact without having to 'gain traction' for an entirely new alt-coin.
I think there are some fundamental limits to the throughput of a single cryptocurrency due to network latency and bandwidth. Perhaps the solution to scalability is simply to have multiple cryptocurrencies and to facilitate atomic swaps between them. So in this sense, the creation of new cryptocurrencies with minor feature changes (litecoin, bitcoin cash, wownero, cheapeth, etc.) is actually good for network diversity.
That being said, the owners of existing "big" cryptocurrencies will usually want to make changes that increase its usability to compete with these "trivial forks"
Bitcoiners have been soured by the idea of a hard fork since the XT dispute, while the monero userbase has commited itself to regular hard forks every 6 months to upgrade the network.
Being anonymous to the 'Real world' but carry an identity in the "BTC world". Wallets, mining, interactions are all public within the network and significantly contributed to it's 'Community', 'make btc wallet size go up', and increase account nonce with use.
Early in the community, these metrics where your 'leaderboards'.
BTC never was anonymous, but rather a 'seperate idenitity'.
The transparency of the ledger is key to the censorship, control, and abuse of the network.
>open source
Are you implying that the cryptonote/zerocoin projects like monero aren't open source?
The original btc had a networked pokergame along with the wallet, but was taken out for a couple of reasons, including regulatory issues.
I'm not saying parent is right, or wrong but to dismiss it and to speak for the core team out of hand is folly.