2,075 karma · joined December 9, 2015
Here's what the Bitcoin whitepaper itself speculated.
"As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner."
And here's an early Bitcointalk thread. Traceability was discussed and acknowledged from the very beginning.
edit: looks like public access is gone now, that's unfortunate.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....